Understanding diversity
February 18, 2008
There are few things more intimidating or terrifying than living in a foreign land, a stranger to native customs and unable to speak the language.
I know. I did it.When I was 21, I moved to Ecuador to live for 18 months as a missionary.
I was greeted at the airport with a friendly, “bienvenido.” (It means “welcome,” but to me it sounded like nothing more than gibberish.) Sí, I replied. Perhaps it is because of this experience, or maybe just because. But I’m interested in understanding the transition immigrants must go through when they come to this land of plenty.
I wonder, too, how that will shape our future. As the immigration debate continues, it seems the gap between American-born citizens and immigrants, particularly Hispanics, widens. I want to see if there is a way to bridge that gap.
So I’ve come up with an idea. Perhaps nowhere is the division so obvious as it is in Incline Village, where the rich are really rich, and the poor equally so. And the economic division is typically drawn down lines of ethnicity.
As my project for this semester in the journalism graduate program at the University of Nevada, Reno, I will be working with middle school students from Lake Tahoe.
My plan is to work with a dozen seventh-graders, equally split down ethnicity, and teach them the basics of journalism. They’ll photograph and write about their own lives, then work with each other to edit their work.
In the process, I hope, they will learn something from and about one another. What it’s like to walk a mile in each other’s shoes, or zapatos, so to speak. And as they learn from one another, maybe we can learn something from them.
Check back here to see their work and progress. I’ll be posting regularly here and on my blog: Nevada Journalist.
Related posts: [ I Get Why I Don’t Get It ] [ Talking about immigration ] [ Get to know us–read our blogs ] [ Don’t label me ] [ Hispanics attend landscaping class ]
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What a great idea for a project, I am a subscriber to this blog, now I will look into the Nevada Journalist, where I hope I will find this project!