Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Spider Kabobs Are Not Appetizing


Today was the day that my project proposal assignment was due. I wrote about advocating for decreasing immigration and citizenship costs for low-income households. My plan was to work with local NGOs and volunteer law firms that addressed these issues and to direct non-citizens within my own community to their services. The only issue that I had with drafting this proposal was finding international law articles that supported my claims. It’s discouraging that the rights of non-nationals are hardly ever addressed on a global scale especially because people are more likely than ever to migrate nowadays. Their lives and freedoms matter just as much as anyone else’s. I could only find articles discussing the right to a nationality and then had to interpret those in my own way. It was a little bit annoying at first, but in the end taught me how to debate effectively and approach similar situations in the future.


Sital Kalantry, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Human Rights Policy Advocacy Clinic at Cornell Law School was our guest speaker for the afternoon session. She spoke about her experiences working in Colombia through the RFK Center, a human rights advocacy nonprofit. The professor’s work in the nation lasted a long 7 years in which they not only investigated the treatment of minority indigenous groups but also found evidence relating to the fact that public education in Colombia was not free and that the minority groups were not granted information that they had specifically been promised by officials in writing. They presented these issues before domestic and international courts and brought about a lot of positive change in the lives of civilians.
J'nai was tired at the RPCC

I was ecstatic and felt extremely grateful to have heard these stories from such an accomplished, worldly, and intellectual person.

Sultana, Pooja, Robson, and I had all submitted the reports that we completed before 5 PM when they were due, so we walked out to Starbucks after class and rewarded ourselves with drinks. I had the pink strawberry acai drink, refreshing, fruity, and cool. It was perfect for an exhausting and extremely hot walk back to Mary Donlon. I, however, didn’t mind the heat as much, because, during the time in between both of our sessions, we had been soaked in the rainwater earlier.

 
The four of us including J’nai and Marian studied in the Donlon lounge for a while. It’s air conditioned in there, or so I’ve heard, but the room doesn’t feel any different to me. We worked on our opinion editorial pieces on the topic of our choice for class a little bit before we were kicked out for movie night.

So, we studied at the RPCC instead. It was cold in there but I got a lot accomplished. We managed to make terrible jokes and laugh hysterically about the simplest matters within that small time frame. Robson kept talking about the fact that he would be willing to eat spider kabobs and insects, but J'nai was not having it. She insisted that he eat a bug off the ground in order to prove to us that it was remotely pleasant.


Sultana and I arrived at Balch for night check just in time. We studied and blogged in the lounge for a while before parting ways.

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