My best guess

Alright, my summer with CGF is about to begin. I met a week and a half ago with the rest of the summer crew about what exactly we have to do over the next 3 months – 31 items on the to-do list!

Here’s what I got out of this meeting.
1. I have to be friendly to community partners. CGF has gotten feedback in the past about not taking our partners’ needs into account as much as we should – so I have to fix all that. I definitely feel up to it, especially after a week of working at the reception desk for Alumni Weekend…Really!! I have confidence in my people skills. I also feel able to collect and implement feedback from those who I work with – I did a lot of it last summer, working with community health committees in Mali.

2. I have to come up with a format for (bi?)monthly community partner meetings. What will we talk about? Will borrowers attend? How much input will each party have? This has to be an organic process – so it’s hard for me to know how it will work out. I’m a little worried about my ability to institutionalize these meetings, but have a feeling that it will be less intimidating once the ball gets rolling.

3. I have to make decisions about CGF’s long term vision!! Granted, we’ll all be talking about it a lot this summer. The part of the vision that I’m especially concerned about is whether or not we want CGF’s student staff members to actively train and educate borrowers. Are we qualified enough? Where would community partners come in? I anticipate a lot of debate around this issue over the summer – I’ll try to implement any resolutions into the community partners structure.

Looking forward to reading over this blog entry at the end of the summer, comparing it to how my work actually plays out. My ideas seem accurate enough right now…

Till next time,
j

The Journey Begins…

Between the winter of 2004 and the summer of 2006 I did three combat tours to Iraq. My purpose there was ostensibly to provide search and rescue for American forces in the city, but I discovered and learned more in my serendipitous interactions with the local people of Mosul, Baquba, and Baghdad than I ever did on any mission I was sent out on. Outside the base, I shared time with children who gathered daily in the broken remains of their schoolhouse to play soccer and practice English with the soldiers at the checkpoint. In a teahouse at the end of the airfield, I drank dark bitter coffee with a Turkish Muslim merchant, an Iraqi Christian translator, and an American soldier while discussing the effects of religion on local education in our respective countries. I also came face to face with the consequences of using education for a darker purpose. Three days after I arrived a young Saudi student, who had left medical school to study jihad in a Syrian madrasah, infiltrated our compound and detonated himself inside our dining facility as soldiers and civilians ate lunch; 18 people were killed and 69 critically injured. That was the first of many days spent inside the hospital, experiencing first hand the results of failed efforts to reach an understanding with the cultures and peoples that exist outside our own borders.

I arrived at Brown in the fall of 2007 determined to expand in ways that linked theory, history, practice, and experience to my understanding of the world. How I could transition from using conflict as the lens through which I viewed the world to a perspective based on study, understanding, and participation. This desire to transform understanding, to expand views of cultures in conflict and stress in different parts of the world, has shaped my efforts here at Brown and abroad. My personal experience with war has placed me on a path to find understanding through social education and community development.

My work with NGOs in Brazil has become the outlet in which I can explore this path.  Capoeira Cidadã and Cinema Nosso, I feel, have both served as a sort of calling to the realm of program evaluation and development. This experience has helped me to clarify what it is that I find important and relevant about social education and what it is that I need to do to have an impact on this field.

From the Word to the World: Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment (BRYTE)

 

by: Rachel Levenson

     During the winter vacation of my freshman year, long before I decided that I would become a Comparative Literature concentrator, I read Dave Eggers’ semi-biographical novel What is the What. There were many aspects of this novel that struck a deep chord within me: the harshness of the lives of refugees in America, the exotic and terrifying accounts of long walks and near death encounters with lions, tragic love stories and romantic reunions. But one fact awakened in me a passion for action and education that has since directed my Brown career: Valentino, the story’s protagonist, could not tell his own story. It was not until Dave Eggers, an already famous novelist, took the time to sit down with Valentino that he was both linguistically and financially able to set his story to the written word. If Dave Eggers had not decided to write a book about Sudanese refugees, if he had not decided to interview Valentino, it is most likely that Valentino still would have been working graveyard shifts and facing repeated rejections on his college applications. And inside Valentino, an important story would have sat untold until it, like those Lost Boys who did not make it through their treks in the Sudanese desert, sat down against a tree, closed its eyes, and died. But Valentino’s story was told, and from the telling of this story appeared ripples of action that are still unfolding, particularly in my own life. What I have learned from reading about Valentino is that stories do have consequences. Literature not only reflects or responds to the world, but it also can reform it.

    I began to tutor with Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment (BRYTE) the following semester. I was matched with Solomon, a then fifteen year old who had arrived in the U.S. only a month before I started working with him. Tutoring Solomon has persistently been one of the most educational aspects of my Brown experience. Like Valentino, Solomon has a story. But unlike Valentino, who could not write his story on his own, Solomon has the chance to learn how to express himself on paper and to author the change in his own life. It is this knowledge that motivates me to visit Solomon week after week. 

    In addition to working as a BRYTE tutor, I began training to become a BRYTE coordinator in the spring of 2008, a position that I took over this past September. As a tutor for BRYTE, I am committed to an individual: Solomon. As a coordinator, I have learned about my potential for effecting change on a community wide scale. While I began work with BRYTE interested in learning the story of an individual, from my coordinator work I have also become interested in the story of a community and the ways that I can best address the needs of thecommunity I am working in as a leader of the BRYTE. Through the window of refugee resettlement, I have been able to look at broader community- and society-wide issues and reach a better understanding of how different pieces of the public and private sectors fit together. Along with this learning, however, is also the recognition that one missing puzzle piece will inhibit the entire puzzle from reaching completion. Whether that missing piece is literacy or mental health care or having the money to buy a new pair of shoes, I have reached a higher understanding of the interrelationships that can both include and exclude residents of this country.

    In What is the What, the organization who helped Valentino disintegrated, despite the intentions and leadership skills of the woman behind it. It is my goal over the course of the next few months to make sure that this does not happen to BRYTE.  As a leader of BRYTE, I have learned to anticipate, identify and respond to various problems that emerge when one is trying to help a large collection of people. Through frequent communication between myself, the International Institute and the Swearer Center, however, I also witnessed the tremendous potential results of collaborations between different partners all interested in the same overall goal. As I work to reevaluate and redesign BRYTE, I am going to work with these community partners. My work will accumulate in a web site and strategic plan and ultimately a more sustainable and effective student-run organization.

Currently, I am half a world away from Providence, Rhode Island. I am studying abroad in Vietnam as part of the International Honors Program’s Health and Community semester. I arrived in Vietnam yesterday, after having spent a month and a half in Tanzania and two weeks in Washington D.C.. While I am physically far from Providence, I am very much in the social entrepreneurship mindset. Through this comparative program I have seen how people address inequality, specifically health inequality in many different domains. In the next post I will discuss what I have learned from this program.

Until then,

Rachel