I promise, reflections on Bosnia are in the works. In the meantime, the profe assigned us to write an entry on the conflicts we are most interested in helping transform. It was a brainstorming piece, and I ended up doing a semi-chronological free-write, which I now share, if you've wondered why I have chosen my current path.
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I have always loved to travel, and have wanted to see and get to know the world since I can remember. Through life, I learned about languages and how culture can vary across a single city, across a region, across a country, before I even set foot abroad.
Cincinnati, OH, is where I grew up. In many respects I'm not meaningfully "from" there, but in some respects, it played a significant role in my life. I went to a variety of schools, including a homeschool program, which were populated by varying mixes of Black and White students, ranging from my being the only non-Black kid at one school, to there only being White kids at another. For the most part, I was young enough that it didn't really matter; we lived in a predominantly Black neighborhood at the time, and there were only a couple of other kids around- so we were friends, because the racial differences were meaningless and unimportant- we wanted to play! Cincinnati is also on the north shore of the Ohio River, which meant that it was a significant point to reach on the Underground Railroad. In school, we learned about slavery, and the supporting institutions, year after year, and occasionally had demonstrations like where they made 20 students stand in a small box to demonstrate how closely the Africans were packed on the ships.
When I was around 12 or so, I learned the words "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide," about of the violence in Serbia and Kosovo. I had no idea of the significance of the final collapse of Yugoslavia, or its place in history.
In high school, I found myself repeatedly frustrated by this incomprehensible trend of people treating other people as less-than. In the slave trade, in the Holocaust (made more personal by a close relationship with my Jewish cousins, although I am not), and then the euphamistic "cleansing" in Kosovo, and so I dove into engineering and physics, taking haven in the purity and beauty of numbers and math, formulas that could take a convoluted expression and distill it into a simple line of variables.
But, then I went to college, and among many other things, learned about the Rwandan genocide, US coverage of which was masked by the nationally enthralling O.J.Simpson trial, about many of the cultural and developmental consequences of European colonialism in Africa (and the United States, and Australia, and Asia...) About the trends of educating indigenous children out of their culture and into Europeanism, where they would never be fully accepted. About the Uigher people in China, who don't have a charismatic leader like the Dalai Lama to the south to bring attention and international sympathy to their support.
I joined the Peace Corps and lived in a rural town in Panama for 2 years, learning firsthand about the disparity between the urban Canal Zone, and the other (vast majority) of the country, about the deep racial lines which unofficially determine who runs which kind of store, to the point where a convenience store is called "the Chinese," and where machismo and sexism is rampant and widely accepted, as well as prevalent alcoholism in a society struggling to balance familiar values and models of how life works, with imposed technology and development, that tries to be benevolent but is tragically disconnected from the actual needs of the recipients.
I lived in Seattle, WA, where I met homeless men and women who just needed a leg up, who had mental challenges, who don't have legal residence, who are tired of the competitive rat race.
Over time, I've met people who really believe that education is teaching others what to think, instead of how to think. I've met people who say "but not me or mine or us," who say "yeah, that's rough," who say, "wow, their society is so backwards," who say "it isn't my/our/my country's problem," and then move on to complain about the offhand, slighting, remark their co-worker made about them, that they happened to overhear.
So, the conflict that compels me isn't specific. It is sort of the conflict between my understanding of humanity as a glorious mess all figuring out how to move forward together, and the framework of us vs. them. It's how a society can try to thrive, while actively undercutting part of its population, because they look/act/sound/value differently, even though the differences bring the richness.
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