Goal Post! (And My First Attempt at a Grown-up Thing)

Goal Post! Yay! Here is to a post that is about what I hope will happen this weekend, to be quite honest. And although my adviser and other students reading this will likely call me a procrastinator for saving this till the last possible second, I have a reason. Earlier today I met with a couple of professionals from the United States Center of Immigration Services at the field office in Albany, and I was able to ask them so many questions about what type of help immigrants and refugees need and receive once they arrive in the Capital District; I hoped it would help me focus in on my central idea a little bit. So, although this post is supposed to be all about the goal, I don't want to forget anything. Just think of the next couple of paragraphs as context for my self-designed assignment!

What I learned was extraordinary. The office runs several different volunteer programs that handle problems that I've never given much thought to. For example, if you can't read English well, it would be difficult to get any type of medical care. First, you would have to navigate through the white-washed corridors filled with signs that are ambiguous even for native speakers, then you have to fill out paperwork that asks you about medical conditions or history that you probably won't know the words for. And even after you get treated, you could get letters in the mail about bills, but if you have any questions, the customer services representative likely won't be able to understand you completely, and who is to guarantee that those bills aren't scams? Growing up, we are so used to the fake advertisements for "a million dollars just for you" or "free cruise tickets if you click here" that it comes as second nature to most of us to question, but some cultures and specific age groups never really had to deal with the level of underhandedness that we find commonplace.

That's why one of the most popular services that the office offers is called "Patient Navigators", and the volunteers in that service offer to drive families to appointments, help fill out paperwork, and help the families get adjusted to the US medical system. Additionally, the office does an ENL (English as a New Language) program, one-on-one mentoring, and a housing helper program; they also have a constantly manned front desk that is there to help anyone whenever they need it (a popular reason to visit is to have the volunteers help with reading the piles upon piles of mail that the families receive). And this is only the beginning, the basics of what they do. The stories I heard, how the program director's face would light up when she remembered a family close to her heart, the beanie babies left on the pillow of the new homes, the overwhelming idea that most of this runs on the back of unpaid volunteers: these things are amazing to me. Unfortunately, I was not aware of the age requirement to be a volunteer (alas I am too young to help in this program), but it was worth it for all of the information I got to hear and the recommendation of another program (RISSE) that I should contact.

Now back to the actual topic. For my self-designed assignment, I am likely going to do an introductory video of several statistics and facts about immigration in the Capital District. As my advisers have pointed out, I am naturally very emotional in my writing and thinking, so I decided that it would be best to balance all of my heart-wrenching stories and interviews with some cold-hard facts. I already have a list of sites and numbers that I've been collecting over these past couple of weeks that will serve as the backbone for the assignment. It will also give my research and my future experiences more of a context, and I'll be able to ask more specific questions in my future interviews and meetings. Even though I've done some work, I'm still a month behind the other participants; I looked at a lot of their first assignments, and many of them had the same concept. After all, the first step after becoming interested in something is to learn how it began and how it has evolved. Only then can you truly appreciate what it has become