For a week each of the past three years, President Lincoln’s Cottage and Students Opposing Slavery have hosted an international youth summit centered on training and empowering youth to combat human trafficking. There are typically around 30 participants, aged around 14-19, with established abolitionists from many backgrounds serving as speakers and facilitators. At the 2015 summit, there were students from seven different countries and six different American states. We meet for only a week, five intensive, long days of powerpoints, brainstorming sessions, lectures, and action-planning. We’re vulnerable. We cry. We laugh. We shout. We deeply feel a need for change, even those of us who haven’t been personally or directly ensnared in the dark world of trafficking.

Last December, I went to Nicaragua and spent my mornings at a local house taking care of children. The experience was novel, to say the least – we put on plays in Spanish, explored the neighbourhood, and played a couple thousand games of tag – and I was struck, constantly, by the comparisons to my life in the USA and my time in Nicaragua.

Alison

ESem Paper #2
September 11, 2015

I still remember the day when I was playing a piano in the common room for my theater audition and a girl came in. She just set beside me and waited for me to finish my practice. After the last song, she said to me with enthusiasm:” The music you played is so beautiful! I really love this song!” 

As I have not played any instrument since I went to high school, I know my music was not as good as she said thus I did not take her sentences seriously at first. However, she compromised my music and my skills for a while and asked me the name of the song. I could feel her passion about music and the ingenuousness when she talked to me. We set together and had some discussion about music that afternoon.

The different approach to make “contact zone”

The title of the story is not “the poor child as a sacrifice” nor “the happy people in Ormeals”, it is “The ones who walk away from Ormeals”. It means the author, Ursula LeGuin, focuses on the people who could not stand with the system in Ormeals and left there. Why it can be the point of the story?

Elena Luedy

Professor Cohen

E-Sem: Changing Our Story

9/11/15

2^nd Essay

“Imagined Communites” and the World We Live In

            What do you define as your community? Your neighborhood? Your town? Your country? The world? It’s hard to say for myself what I identify my community as. In some ways I thought of it as my town and now that I am at Bryn Mawr College, my college. But in other ways I thought of my overarching community as my country. I am a citizen of The United States of America, doesn’t that make me part of the American community? But what really is the American community?

A shower bag, a shampoo, a hair conditioner, a couple of clothes hangers…and, finally, a couple mechanical pencils for me and my roommate. I thought over and over millions of times what I should get for her to deliver my overly excited feeling toward meeting her. The high school where I went to was a boarding school, an hour and a half long distance from my house by car, three hours by bus. It was possible to go home on weekends, but I decided not to except for the monthly mandatory “Going Home Weekend.” The time it would take me and my parents going back and forth to the school and the repeated poignant moments of saying good bye to my parents every weekend were some kind of considerations that made me decide to stay at the school even on weekends.