What I Said I Would Do
What I Did
My global citizenship study was focused on Indian culture. My blog served as my biggest form of documentation this year. I wrote about larger experiences which often reflected many of my smaller ones. What I mean by this is when I explain something big like a festival little things like what family members are called comes into that story. In India, each member of the family is called something different. If I went to a festival with my massi, I would have to explain that my massi is my mom’s sister.
There were several things that I felt were a major part of the culture, but did not want to talk about on my blog. I didn’t feel comfortable talking about things that could relate to politics and other more sensitive parts of the culture publicly. Some things such as sexism, gender ratio, and marriage were open to conversation in my household. This was because my host family is more liberal and comfortable talking about such things. In any other household, we probably wouldn’t have had as many conversations. This is an example of TS 5, informed, integrated, and critical thinking. Having these conversations allowed me to dive deeper into certain aspects of the culture. Due to the discomfort in the Indian public, I didn’t want to talk about certain things in a public setting on my blog. and I wrote a separate document for these and shared it with my teachers. I wanted to show my knowledge of these aspects of the culture as they are where things get very in-depth. These are also that aspect of the culture that you can’t fully understand from the internet. These are the aspects of the culture that you have to spend time in the country to understand.
My last piece of documentation was another writing piece. I interviewed people who practice Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Islam, and Hinduism. I planned to write about each of these, but found that the person I interviewed about Jainism wasn’t very in depth. It didn’t give me enough information to write anything. I planned to interview another person who was Jain, but it didn’t end up happening. The woman who I interviewed about Islam was extremely in depth. However, this was very particular to her sect, and I didn’t end up doing anything with this either, because I did not feel it was broad enough.