Learnings/Summary; Nish Thiyagarajah

Over the past ten weeks, while I can’t exactly say this class has been the focal point of my life, I can say with honesty that I’ve been thoroughly surprised by it. The experience of mentoring Kevin, while fleeting, has been really great. I’ve learned a lot, and have been able to do a lot of reflection through these photo journals. My family went through issues involving immigration, and this class has allowed me to go back and, as I said, reflect a decent amount on everything in the context of my experiences and who I am today. 

First day at AMIS.

In terms of the mentoring at AMIS, I was first paired with Kevin when we showed up at AMIS all those weeks ago, not knowing at all just how this experience was going to go. He seemed at first to just hate me, seeming just apathetic about everything I said or asked, and though I’m not exactly proud of it took me several minutes to piece together that he really just wasn’t able to speak English.  Upon this realization, I was pretty doubtful as to how we’d ever develop any kind of mentee mentor relationship, given that my Spanish experience was a couple of years removed and never particularly developed to begin with. 

However, I quickly realized that the so called language barrier people seem to be so anxious about really doesn’t  have to come so far between people so as not to let them communicate with one another. We eventually became very friendly, and this was established through not just limited actual communication, but familiarity developing from simple activities like drawing, gesturing, and the like. The thing is that a lot of kids, especially young immigrant children, don’t yet file the same stereotypes that many of us do due to the ins and outs of growing up in America, so there’s no stigma in becoming comfortable with a person- if they get along, they get along.

In the last few weeks.

In my mind, culture is as important as ever, and Kevin, who always said he loved his home more than anything, and didn’t seem to like it here especially, even showed me that I’d like to learn a little more about my homeland’s culture and maybe cultivate some of that cultural competence. As I'm transferring to a different school next year, sadly I won't be able to continue the mentoring relationship, but I hope if anything, Kevin was able to learn from our time there that visible differences between people should make no difference in how we talk to or interact with one another, and also that his adjustment to living here goes smoothly as he grows older and gains some perspective.