A Better Explanation

Hopefully my last post didn’t make it sound like I was having a bad time down here! I heard back from a few of you who thought that might be the case. I wouldn’t say I’m having the time of my life yet, but it’s definitely been a lot of fun – and, more importantly, a very new and interesting experience. I’m still working on the Spanish thing, and I bought a pocket-size English-Spanish Practical Conversation Guide yesterday. I’ve found that I’m getting okay at asking the important questions, but that I never have any luck in understanding the responses people give me. It’s a work in progress and I’ll just hope it gets a little better each day!

On Friday, I tried to upload a blog description so that you all have a better idea of what I’m doing down here. It didn’t work, though, so I’ll dedicate this post to a better explanation. I didn’t really have a clue what I’d be doing until this past week was over, so I never had a very good answer for anybody who asked about it. I’m still not 100% sure, but I have a much better idea than when I arrived! To be clear, I’m not teaching English to Costa Rican children at an orphanage or anything like that. Lots of people assumed that’s the sort of thing this was when they heard the word “peace.” The University for Peace is really just a graduate school for peace-related disciplines. In case that’s still too vague, here are some examples of degrees you can earn at the university: International Law and Human Rights; Media, Peace & Conflict Studies; Responsible Management and Sustainable Economic Development; Gender and Peacebuilding; and Natural Resources and Sustainable Development. Most students leave the school with the hopes of having some tangible impact on the direction of their countries and/or the world. They’ve been pretty successful in that regard, and alumni have become policymakers, diplomats, journalists, professors, members of NGOs and the United Nations, and entrepreneurs.

In this year’s graduating class, there were 175 students from 51 different countries – which is pretty incredible. Last week, I sat in on a discussion about the importance of inter-faith dialogue. The classroom had no more than 30 people in it, but there were students and professors from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, China, Germany, France, Burundi, Egypt, and the United States. On a bus ride back from UPEACE on Friday, I spoke to a Rwandan student about the current state of his country, and we discussed some of the reasons why Rwanda has made such an unprecedented recovery from its 1994 genocide. It’s really a cool place and I doubt there’s another one like it in the world. I’m extremely lucky to have the opportunity to be taking this all in.

My personal responsibilities at UPEACE are not fully defined yet. So far, I’ve been doing more office work than anything else – scanning documents, entering grades into the University's system, etc. But in a couple of weeks, we’ll be hosting students from UC-Berkeley for a five-week course on human security and peacebuilding. Then there will be a group of students from Loyola Law School in LA, followed by another from Western Washington University. I’ll be helping out with the logistics for all of these programs and, hopefully, I’ll have the chance to sit in on as many courses and lectures as possible. There seems to be a lot of flexibility in my job, so I’m expecting to have helped with a wide variety of tasks before I come back in August.

This post is already pretty long, so I’ll share some funny stories in the next one. And I’ll be sure to update you all on the internship as I learn more about it. For now, I’m off to bed so that I can get a run in before work. ¡Buenas noches!