On this blog, I’ll be keeping a personal track record of the research and interviews Megan and I conduct throughout the semester. Other sections of the site will have more of an academic/professional orientation; these posts, however, will take on a more personal tone.

I found out about the Voices course offering (and about COPLAC itself) through my faculty advisor, who is incidentally our dean of Interdisciplinary Studies. She recommended it to me after I told her about my summer job as a journalist, which at times touched on migrancy coverage; I had also worked the previous semester as an office assistant for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in Rome. Thinking it would serve as a good résumé builder, we began to fill out the forms.

However, my interest in and, more importantly, concern for issues of immigration and refugees extends to before these jobs. Months before I started with JRS, I had paid more and more attention to the growing migrant crisis. The plight of many throughout the world plucked at my heartstrings: What must it be like to suddenly have everything, your home, your daily life, your family, even at times your children, ripped away from you by the powers that be or forces above your control? These questions sound cliche, but the issue lodged in my heart, in my mind, and in my prayers.

The new administration brought a heightened awareness of this crisis. Announcements of President Trump’s executive orders on a border wall and refugee vetting came as I sat in the Newark airport on my way to Italy; shortly after landing, I contacted my representatives, and my opposition to the measures was shortly thereafter hardened as the US Catholic bishops roundly condemned the orders; Pope Francis had already famously made the refugee crisis and immigration themes of his pontificate, which for Americans came into particular light during his visit to Ciudad Juarez at the US-Mexico border.

With this, weeks of pondering the migrant crisis, a pondering which had seemingly arisen in me of a sudden from nowhere, came to a head with amateur political activism as I called and wrote my representatives from Rome and tracked progress both in the White House as well as Congress. My time with JRS brought me an opportunity, to some degree, to let this percolate into my everyday life; however, due to my limited hours, a multi-layered language barrier, and an office staff who were almost as new as I was, I did not receive an opportunity to interact personally with any of the many migrants whom JRS helps in Rome out of our offices by the Chiesa del Gesù. The following summer, the brief coverage of immigration panels I provided was even done remotely.

The Voices course, then, came as an opportunity for a long-delayed change of perspective. Rather than continuing to simply sit in some sort of journalistic or bureaucratic ivory tower as this issue continued to bump into my life, this presented me a tangible possibility of interacting personally with groups of people who had chosen to leave their homeland. Kirksville has been a good home, and migrancy has woven itself in and out of my life over the past year. A course covering immigration would allow me to turn my attention from headlines on a screen to a human person in front of me, and furthermore allow me to provide new resources to the community that so generously welcomes us undergrads. Voices, then, personally fulfills its name: I finally get to hear the voices of those I’ve read so much about.