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.

Rethinking Immigration- Nish Thiyagarajah

Being an American born child of immigrant parents, with an entire family in our home country, I have a fair amount of personal experience involved with the subject when it comes to immigration. My father and mother traveled here through Canada in the late 70s through asylum due to violence that was happening in their country, as well as my father’s attainment of a scholarship from no other than the University of Cincinnati. They had a relatively hard time adjusting, and early on it caused our family a lot of problems which created unnecessary stress. I think one of the biggest problems for a lot of immigrants is accepting a role of lower distinction in this country when compared with their home country, most likely because of the ability to communicate effectively. This became such a problem for my mom that she was pretty much desperate to leave, which she did.


In terms of legislation, I personally have a lot of problems with our current regulations. When she left, it voided their request for asylum and so my dad, who was basically working his ass off and just beginning becoming successful in his place of work, was forced to toss everything aside and care for my sister and I above anything and everything else. I was four years old back then, and my sister was 12. My mother has tried, repeatedly, for the past 14 years, to regain citizenship and travel back here to be with us again. But so much money thrown at lawyers, court proceedings, and failed musings simply on how to reunite a mother with her children, has forced us to move on with our lives, because with all that time grew a large distance, and I don’t mean the 10,000 mile distance from here to Sri Lanka, but an emotional one. It’s sad, but it happens. All the time, immigrants without valid visas are swooped up with no warning, leaving children and families behind with no warning or sign of their disappearance. Personally, my experience with it has left me no belief whatsoever in the status quo and completely detached emotionally in terms of everything that’s happened.


My personal vision of immigration is simply people just looking to get a better life for themselves and perhaps remove themselves from a despondent situation. Really its just laughable to me, that immigration can be such a controversial topic considering it’s the foundation of this country and we’re all technically immigrants, stupid as that might sound. The government, at the same time, is doing what they need to in order to properly deal with people who are breaking the law. I’ve just never understood the lack of empathy actively displayed by the institution.


In terms of rethinking cultural identity, while my answer might not be all that satisfying, it’s simply what you make of it. That is to say, one’s cultural identity is, to me, an encompassment of who they are, what they’ve experienced and the people they surround themselves with. It’s a really broad topic, and to be honest I am not a fan of these types of questions at all. I think there’s so many different ways to think about something like cultural identity, and the best approach in my mind is to simply have respect for culture in general but not to treat others any differently than you’d approach a random person who looks “perfectly normal.” Cliched, yes. But the golden rule has that moniker for a reason.

Week 8: Effects of culture on health- Nish Thiyagarajah

There is a great deal of meanings one can take from the simple phrase- the “effects of culture on health.” For one, the emotional toll that a significant move such as uprooting one’s family to transition abruptly can be “highly disruptive”(Suarez-Orozco), and such a transition can also “trigger a variety of reactions, including excitement, anticipations, and hope as well as anxiety, anger, depression, somatic complaints, and illness”(Suarez-Orozco). Immigration, in fact, is indeed stressful. 

My mom and dad right after they moved to Cincinnati.

In the case of my parents, it proved to be stressful to the breaking point, in fact. I’ve talked to my dad and mom, as well as others, over the years, and generally I hear the same kind of thing over and over. The way it’s told to me, you come here and attempt to establish a live, maybe have children, go to school, find a job, etc. However, there apparently comes a time for pretty much every immigrant, most of them at least, where you develop an incredibly strong desire to go home and you miss everything about said home country. My mother was almost driven to insanity by this pressure, and so badly wanted to go back to Sri Lanka and see her father and brothers that she sadly went a year too early, against the advice of our lawyers, and voided hers and my father’s visas, or something of the like, I don’t know the specifics down to a tee because that part of it isn’t all that important to me, but she ended up stuck there, with the sad realization that she had been looking at the wrong concept of “family” all along, in terms of me, my sister and dad. 

Right after I was born.

I only say this because it’s a very good example, in my mind, of how the effects of such mental stress can go totally wrong. I think that at times being in a completely foreign place without any kind of connection to your concept of home can just be overwhelming if things at home aren’t just perfect. For my mother, learning English and going from being a valedictorian in high school to struggling to get by at NKU, simply because of the language barrier, was very much overwhelming and hard to get over. It caused all kinds of problems, and when anything frustrated her at home, it took things to a metaphorical breaking point. I think that at times, though, people can persevere through, such as the case of my father, who just read and reread books of English grammar and semantics until they clicked for him. 

In the case of children, who might not understand how to adjust, this could potentially cause all kinds of problems, if their parents aren’t particularly supportive. Luckily for Kevin, even though he’s quiet, he has a family that cares about him and keeps a very comfortable and reinforcing home environment.

Week 5: Cultural Practices

Me and my little cousin Abi.

I’d imagine that for immigrant children, especially those who are moved here at some point in their young lives as opposed to being born in this country to immigrant parents, saying that school here is an adjustment would be an understatement. And a large one at that. For one thing, the language barrier is probably the most immediate and obvious factor requiring getting used to for a young child from a foreign environment. To see most of your new group of peers as completely separate from yourself isn’t exactly easy to deal with at a very young age. However, a lot of kids, especially the younger children, seem to adjust very well. Take, for example, my 7 year old cousin Abicsha, who lives in Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka. When I stayed with my uncle’s family this past summer, she was at first definitely scared of me ( We hadn’t met before as it had been something like 8 years since I had visited), and over the course of one or two weeks, had actually picked up a good amount of English from talking to me more and more, and even was teaching me some Tamil, one of Sri Lanka’s native languages, though I wasn’t nearly as adept a student. The rapidness of her becoming very familiar and even close with me showed, in my opinion, that at times younger kids can adjust to new factors very well and accept them fully, even develop preference for new things learned over old concepts. Some kids, however, seem to retract for the most part, mainly because, in my opinion at least, they have no window of reference for anything they observe and seem to see everything as completely foreign, and this can even be synonymous with bad at times. My mentee, Kevin, in particular is very quiet, but as the weeks go by its clear that even though I don’t speak Spanish very well at all, he’s becoming increasingly comfortable and familiar with me, waiting for me to walk back to class and waving any time we see each other in the school. He obviously mocks my poor grasp on his language, but like I said, he seems to be adjusting to the situation he’s placed in. At first, there was very little communication from his side, as he always kept his head down, nodding or shaking his head as an answer, and mumbling. The last two times we went to AMIS he seemed a lot more personable and opinionated about a lot of things, indicating a building level of comfort. We’ve talked(to an extent, obviously) about what he thinks of his school and the new environment, however, and he doesn’t hesitate at all in making it known that he prefers his home culture to that of his current environment. Though he’s in a class with other Spanish speakers, I never have seen him interacting with other kids his age, but this could also just be because he’s very new to the school, according to members of the staff I’ve spoken to. His interactions, though limited as I just said, seem to be primarily with other Spanish speakers, mainly teachers, and not by choice but by obligation, though he never seems angry or visibly upset in any way. I think because of his relative lack of time spent in this environment, his home culture is very much kept alive, because his lack of exposure in rarely interacting with others would mean that’s probably still the only influence on his particular “culture.” In my case, when I was very young, as in birth to the age of 5 or 6, I was still involved heavily in my homegrown Sri Lankan culture, because my mom still lived with us and she always brought me to play with other Sri Lankan kids, those of her friends, as there was (and still is) a pretty tightly knit Sri Lankan community in Cincinnati. But when she left to Sri Lanka, as my dad was forced to pretty much work around the clock and take care of my sister and I, we started to lose touch with that side of ourselves. I was fluent in Tamil at that age, but as my dad had to prioritize our education and happiness, he didn't have time to reinforce a home culture and so I lost touch with it gradually. Because after all of this I grew up not being around any of my peers, meaning Sri Lankans aside from my father and sister, and grew very close to my predominantly white friends, I really never had a chance to keep any of my cultural practices alive over the years, and so my home culture has faded over time, something I’ve always regretted. For that reason, I think it’s a good thing Kevin is so attached to that very home culture, because it really is an important part of his identity and something he should hold onto as he gets older and older, as opposed to my approach, trying to recapture it now.

With my sister(middle), my aunt and uncle, when home culture was a central part of life.