New York City

As the days keep progressing, I have learned a lot as well as exploring one of the famous city in the United States that I never visited before. I only heard great things about the city including people saying that, a city that never sleeps. I kept questioning myself how can a city be without sleeping? Also, the advertisement on TV about that city, are more likely to convince you to go for a vacation. My fellow interns and I had the opportunity to go to New York City on Wednesday evening and stayed there for 4 days. We explored nearly the entire city of New York City. 

With most of the famous movies being produced there, including a lot of things to see, New York City was one of the cities that I had dreamed of visiting when I first came to the United States. I am very grateful for the Ethnic Young Adult internship which gave me the opportunity to visit New York City. The day kicked off on Thursday where we learned the United States Immigration Timeline and Exploring the Shifting Definition of Citizenship--through this session, we learned about who was defined as United States citizen and who made those decisions. One of the thing I learned from that session was that, the soon the thirteen colonies gained it independence from the Great Britain, they wanted some laws on who could become a U.S citizen, without recognizing the people who were found first on the land and forgetting the language of Declaration of Independence which said, “All men are created equal” they went on and claimed that only free white men would be allowed to be a U.S. Citizen. All women, African-American, and Native American were under represented in the United States. It wasn’t until the end of 1868 when African American became the Citizen of the U.S. but only men would still be allowed to vote and women would still be denied. In  1920 women were granted the right to vote and the Native Americans were not granted the U.S. Citizen until 1924--although they lived on this land generations and generations, they became the last to be recognized under the law as a U.S. citizen. On Friday, we had the bible study where we learned chapters in the bible that talks about immigration, which led us to understand that refugee and immigration process did not only start during our time--refugees and immigrants have been a part of our tradition and it has been there more than we have been alive. We concluded the day by visiting the United Nation, where we also learned the history and how every state is represented. During this visit, one of the thing that I was impressed with was the amount of money spent on a daily basis on military needs. From the beginning of the day until the time we were at the U.N $ 2,760,859,376 was already spent on the military. On Saturday, Kevin and I went for a tour, where we explored more than we could ever imagine, we walked through the Brookland Bridge and we had a chance to see the statue of liberty in four miles away. 

The New York City trip enforced the belief that, history is living in our time for reason and we should not ignore it, because the purpose of the history is to make us think about all the mistakes made in the past and to use that as guides in decision making in order to come with decisions that are satisfactory and fair to all.

Engoma.
GBCS Intern 2017
Church World Service