Heading Home

After more than two weeks of daily blogging, my streak came to an end yesterday. Sad day.

I was too exhausted from a long day yesterday and had too little sleep the night before, so I heeded my own advice about not blogging unless I was more than 75% awake and went straight to bed. I have to say though I'm proud that I kept up the daily blogging this year as opposed to only blogging twice during a five week program (a.k.a. my HIA experience in Berlin).

So, to catch up.

Yesterday was our last day of class, so we spent the morning at the Iqbal Masih school again, although this time we actually got to sit on classes.

The first class that I went to was part of the preschool and the students were all four years old. I don't even remember what I did at four years old, but it was nice to be a kid playing with wooden blocks on the floor again.

We had split into smaller groups to visit classes, so Manka, Sterling, and I joined our host teacher in this class of four year olds. At first, Sterling and I felt really awkward in the class because we couldn't speak Italian and being the much older "intruders" we weren't given the warmest welcome.

But Manka encouraged us to just start mingling with the kids, so we got on the floor and tried to join the fun. All I could say was "Come si chiama?" to ask their names and then introduce myself. After that, the rapid flow of Italian went in one ear and out my other. The blank look on our faces gave away our inability to speak Italian, so they lost interest and moved to another corner of the room.

The experience though was also an eye-opening one and a sort of time-warp back to my childhood when I helped translate for a Chinese kid in my preschool class (whoa, I guess I do remember back to then). He didn't speak English, so I had to help translate for him in class. The details are fuzzy for me, but I've heard stories from my parents. =P

But I also could relate to the new immigrant children coming into an Italian school. There is much less diversity and fewer classmates you could relate to if you don't speak Italian. That being the case for both Sterling and me as we sat in the middle of the play area, we both started just building little things out of the wooden blocks by ourselves. I made a Jenga-like tower with the thin wooden 4-inch planks. I got it to be about a foot tall before one of the little boys came over with a mischievious grin on his face.

He had a single wooden plank clutched in his fist, and as he hovered over my tower, he turned to his female classmate next to him to ask if he should drop the plank into the middle of my tower. She approved enthusiastically, so it was "bombs away" with the plank-dropping. All of the kids wanted to join in in destroying the tower, so after about three planks, they just grabbed the whole thing and knocked it over.

Although I was a bit dismayed that my tower had just been destroyed (not really), it was a nice way of connecting with them. We laughed and then, just like that, they went back to their games.

So, I lined the planks up like dominos.

I'm not sure if they'd ever played with dominos as one of the boys came over and had a confused look on his face. I knocked the first plank down and the whole row fell in succession. He was pretty surprised to see that and so we made another one together with a few curves. At this point, we had to leave, so he knocked the row down and went back to his games. It was a pretty fun experience though and a nice reminder of what it's like to be a kid again.

The second class we went to was a bit older. I thought they were around second or third grade. They were in the middle of their spelling lesson, so Jasmine, Irene, and I watched from the back of the room. It reminded me of third grade when our spelling contest hit a wall after no one could figure out how to spell "autumn."

The funniest thing that we saw in the class was actually right before they left for lunch--they lined up to get soap from one of the students (who won the stampede to find the soap dispenser) and then lined up to get a towel stuffed in the front of their shirt to dry their hands (the bathroom was down the hall). Their system seemed to work well.

The class itself was not diverse at all though. Everyone was Italian. We had learned that the school had a large Roma community, but because of recent moves by the right-wing government, those families had moved away from their camp. One teacher was extremely upset by these recent developments because the school had worked for twenty years to develop the trust and relationship to integrate the Roma students into the school. Now, she didn't know where a lot of those families had gone because the entire community had left after the unwelcome approaches of the government. It's definitely something I want to learn more about, and I did find some info on the European Commission's website too.

After this, we headed back towards the Rome Center to a restaurant nearby for our last group meal. It was a nice Italian meal, but I was stuffed after the pasta and couldn't finish much else.

Our final scheduled component was meeting with G2, a second generation immigrant youth organization, started by young people who grew up as the children of immigrants in Italy. The country has extreme problems in integrating this population because they are not immigrants (most were either born in Italy or have grown up in Italy since a very young age) but they are treated as foreigners.

It was an incredibly rewarding discussion, and I learned a lot from them. Over the next three months ass Brukab and I write our paper on the challenges of accessing higher education for children from immigrant backgrounds in Italy, it will be intriguing to talk more with them. I will share more of these thoughts when I get a chance to debrief about my trip (I will try and write a long post about the entire program after I get back to Seattle--keep me accountable please).

That was a great way to end out program. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in Rome and definitely learned a ton. Manka is an awesome professor and definitely put together a fantastic program.

Brukab and I finished our night by going out to do a bit of shopping in Rome. We ended up going back the Trevi Fountain, so I could take a panoramic picture of it at night (my battery died yesterday). I haven't had time to stick it together, so that'll go in my final post too. Here's one we did get though:

Today, we're checking out of our apartment (I should be packing right now), and then dropping off our stuff at the Rome Center. We can't stay in the apartment for the night for some reason, so we're camping out with everyone at the airport for our 12 pm flight tomorrow. This afternoon though, I'm going to go to the Etruscan Museum, so I can see one last AP Art History piece.

Not sure I'll have internet before I get home, so my next post will most likely be when I've returned to Seattle (I arrive around 5 pm on Saturday Seattle time). It's been a fantastic five weeks in Rome and an even better summer after spending 10 out 16 weeks in Europe. I'm bummed to have to leave, but this upcoming school year will be another fun and exciting one.

Ciao from Rome!