First January Post

During my visits to RISSE this month, I met a couple kids who are really interesting. Not only are they amazingly voluble about their emigration to the U.S., but they are also fun, interesting people who I have quickly become exceedingly fond of. One of them is a good friend of another girl at RISSE who I’ve known for a while; the two of them are in different grades, but they go to the same school and have been close friends “forever.”

The biggest change in my project for this semester is something I’m hoping to start doing soon, which is to spend Tuesday mornings at school with some of my subjects. I would just follow them around, recording and observing them in order to collect more scenes and details for my profiles of them. I’ve already talked to the two girls I mentioned earlier about this possibility and they are both up for it.

I’m also planning on spending more time researching background information about the places these kids are from, like Thailand, Iraq and the Congo. I have a lot of reading materials about the Middle East, but the children at RISSE come from all over the world, and I want to be more informed about the situations each of them left when they came here. 

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