Rachel: Week 8

This week we held another game afternoon. I thought it was a lot of fun.. granted it was just me sitting at a table playing Jenga for a half hour by myself... It truly is disappointing to plan something and be so excited about it then have no one show up to enjoy it with you. Today was another one of those days. Since school is winding down and there is more and more homework to do and more and more events to go to around campus I guess this would be a valid explanation for the lack of attendance at our event. I hope that we can finish strong in the next week and have the chance to meet a few more of the IEP students. Outside of the events I think I am really starting to build personal relationships with the few that I have met and those have truly began to be the most rewarding. I found one of the Arabic students in the Union yesterday and I had the chance to sit down with him and talk about how he was liking everything in Lincoln. It was really nice to actually feel like I was able to interact with the students and let them meet me for me, not just an icon on the Facebook page blowing up their walls bout our events, but someone who really cared about their time here. I think he really appreciated it and I know I really loved the opportunity. He inspired one of our last events; the week after next we will be throwing him an American birthday party. I am really excited to see how it turns out.

Rachel: Week 7

Well, it finally happened. After months of planning and careful precision, Project Nepal came to life. And it was absolutely amazing. It made all of the hard work, time, and tears worth it. I coordinated project Nepal through University Suites Housing Diversity Committee, which I am chair of. I presented a bill to RHA which gave us 1,000 dollars to work with to host the event. We partnered with Students Overcoming Stereotypes, Nepalese Student Association, OASIS, the Women's Center, Nebraska University Students Against Modern Slavery, The Evangelical Alliance Mission, and Tiny Hands International. It was an awareness event about the country of Nepal as well as the problems that it has with being a source country for human trafficking. We sold tshirts, had a raffle, free food and free admission, and the president of NSA and I did a presentation on the subject. Overall we raised over $500 and had over 100 people attend. It was amazing to see what I could do when I really put work into planning an event and have the support from everyone to see it become something. So many of the IEP students were there and it was so awesome having their support and being able to get them involved with so many other people from campus. There were people from the greek community, volunteers from the athletics department, IEP students, and such a wide variety of people who came to learn about Nepal and help support my mentor who is doing cross culture work in Nepal to prevent human trafficking. It definitely became one of the most rewarding experiences of the year and I don't think I would have had the courage to do it without the support of everyone around me.

I also had a chance to meet a student from Egypt who came out to support my event. I went to her house last week to meet her husband and she made me dinner. I was able to sit down with her and talk about her home country and help her with her english. It was such a fantastic experience and made me realize just how much this means to me. I believe that it is the most important thing to learn from each other, to be exposed and learn from others cultures and beliefs. She is a Muslim woman who wears a hijab and she actually sat there laughing as she explained to me how it worked and why she wore it. It completely opened my eyes because here I have been wondering my whole life about the Muslim faith, a huge hush hush in American culture, and having her explain to me the modesty aspect made it seem like something that wasn't something so foreign. It was something that I could relate to my culture and understand it. This internship really opens those doors for me and it is something that is truly making me grow as a person. From having the courage to plan a campus wide event to sitting down and simply talking to a woman who is so different than me that became one of my good friends.