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Hi! My name is Joy Weisel. For those of you who don’t know I am going into my fourth year at Western Washington University, Fairhaven College. I designed my own concentration in Multicultural Education, East African Cultural Studies, Nonprofit Management and Photography as a Form of Empowerment/Education. The hope is to take my education and life experience and use it to work in solidarity with immigrant and refugee communities. I am most passionate about education reform, particularly regarding English Language Learner experiences.
The next step in my education is a study abroad program in Uganda, learning how societies heal after conflict. I will be doing this through SIT’s program, Uganda: Post Conflict Transformation. You can check the program out here, if you’d like: studyabroad.sit.edu/programs/semester/fall-2016/ugr/
This experience would greatly enrich my education, and, more importantly, add to the skills I will be able to bring back to my own community. One of the main reasons I am doing this, aside from the amazing learning opportunity it presents, is to fuel the research I hope to continue in graduate school, where I hope to study displacement and it’s relationship with learning. This is all working on a path towards eventually creating a learning space that acknowledged the experiences of students, the identities present in the space, and works to incorporate those into the classroom.
As many of you likely know, I have grown up in Boise, Idaho doing resettlement work with my family’s nonprofit Catch!Life. My friends and (chosen) family have come to the U.S. as refugees; my grandmother was the daughter of two survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Our family’s life is largely consumed by intergenerational impacts of genocide, resettlement struggles, and the many other challenges of healing from conflict. This is a subject I am very passionate about and I am so blessed to have the opportunity to study in Uganda.
However, as a Pell Eligible student, I am coming up a little short on costs. I have been privileged enough to receive a number of scholarships and grants that cover a lions share of the program expenses, and I was able to save enough of my earnings through the school year to cover most of my vaccinations and medication. However, I am unable to afford the plane tickets and some other additional costs (such as malaria medication) and am thus turning to my community for some aide. Though I am saving my summer earnings and living very frugally in order to save money, it does not look like I will be able to make it without a little help from my communities.
Trip Details
The program goes August, 21st-December 3rd. Much of it takes place in Gulu, which is a city in Northern Uganda and is where a majority of Uganda’s internally displaced peoples reside. It is largely considered to be a post-conflict community, as the region experienced war up until making peace in 2005, and now many are in the process of creating home again.
The next step in my education is a study abroad program in Uganda, learning how societies heal after conflict. I will be doing this through SIT’s program, Uganda: Post Conflict Transformation. You can check the program out here, if you’d like: studyabroad.sit.edu/programs/semester/fall-2016/ugr/
This experience would greatly enrich my education, and, more importantly, add to the skills I will be able to bring back to my own community. One of the main reasons I am doing this, aside from the amazing learning opportunity it presents, is to fuel the research I hope to continue in graduate school, where I hope to study displacement and it’s relationship with learning. This is all working on a path towards eventually creating a learning space that acknowledged the experiences of students, the identities present in the space, and works to incorporate those into the classroom.
As many of you likely know, I have grown up in Boise, Idaho doing resettlement work with my family’s nonprofit Catch!Life. My friends and (chosen) family have come to the U.S. as refugees; my grandmother was the daughter of two survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Our family’s life is largely consumed by intergenerational impacts of genocide, resettlement struggles, and the many other challenges of healing from conflict. This is a subject I am very passionate about and I am so blessed to have the opportunity to study in Uganda.
However, as a Pell Eligible student, I am coming up a little short on costs. I have been privileged enough to receive a number of scholarships and grants that cover a lions share of the program expenses, and I was able to save enough of my earnings through the school year to cover most of my vaccinations and medication. However, I am unable to afford the plane tickets and some other additional costs (such as malaria medication) and am thus turning to my community for some aide. Though I am saving my summer earnings and living very frugally in order to save money, it does not look like I will be able to make it without a little help from my communities.
Trip Details
The program goes August, 21st-December 3rd. Much of it takes place in Gulu, which is a city in Northern Uganda and is where a majority of Uganda’s internally displaced peoples reside. It is largely considered to be a post-conflict community, as the region experienced war up until making peace in 2005, and now many are in the process of creating home again.