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Burim posted an update 4 years, 3 months ago
Today for Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day, I attended a Justice Dialogue called “Urban Youth Mission: A Light in the City”. In this session, everybody pretended to be a part of this mission trip of exploring the Chicago area for the next seven days! We noticed how bad the socio-economic class had been in some areas of Illinois because of homelessness. For example, the average age of a person who becomes homeless is just at nine-years old! It was evident a sense of poverty was going around the area of Chicago, no matter if you lived on the North, West or South side. We also touched on the points of violence and racial injustice toward minorities in and around the area of Chicago due to gangs or drug usage that was happening on the streets. Then, we shifted gears to think about what kinds of “tools from our tool box”, such as Food Banks that the Wooster community has that we could volunteer at, that could also help benefit those suffering through harsh times right now in and around Chicago. Finally, we ended the session by participating in a live exercise called “The Privilege Walk”. Basically, the speaker read multiple statements to us, and if any applied to our own lives in some way we would take a step forward or a step backward, depending on what she said. Then, by the end of this activity, we all took a moment to see where everybody ended up at, and then took five or ten minutes to reflect on this exercise we had just done. I thought this Justice Dialogue really connected well back to our Travel Writing class because some of these same issues face people each and every day in other countries around the world, such as homelessness, poverty, and violent racial injustice. So, I think of how blessed I am of where I am personally in life according to those things I just listed above, and even though I haven’t had much of an opportunity to travel to different places outside the United States, I am certain it would be a real eye-opener of an experience for me to witness firsthand what kinds of things some people are going through on a day-by-day basis like I had mentioned earlier in some unfortunately underdeveloped countries/cities/communities, that would cause me as a person to feel guilty of all the wonderful commodities that I take for granted here in USA without even realizing it most of the times. An example of this is being able to have the opportunity to go to college and further my educational skills beyond high school.