Spanish & Illinois

Ok everyone! I just wanted to remind you all about a few upcoming events we have. First of all, for the Spanish conversation tables the meeting times and locations are set. So if you would like to join, you have three different options: Mondays from 5 to 6pm in Gregory Hall 207 Tuesdays from 4 to 5pm in Gregory Hall 207 Thursdays from 5 to 6pm in the Foreign Language Building 1128 I am leading the group on Mondays and I would love to see you all there! I also wanted to remind everyone that the Latin American Film Festival is starting this week. If you would like information the films they are showing and movie times please click here.

[Photo: Holy Name Food Pantry] During spring break I actually volunteered at a food pantry in Waukegan, Illinois. It is interesting that Holy Name Food Pantry provides many of the same services as the Refugee Center in Urbana-Champaign. For starters, the food pantry provides guidance and advice on citizenship and legal matters. In addition, the workers at the food pantry help people to find protection and shelter. People who feel threatened can go to the pantry and be temporarily relocated to a safer place. Lastly, the food pantry provides short-term loans for rent payments in the case of an emergency. The main purpose of the food pantry is, of course, to provide food for needy families. Nevertheless, the aforementioned services are extremely important to many members of the community, including a large Hispanic population. The food pantry is an essential resource for many of the Hispanic citizens of Waukegan, like the Refugee Center is for the immigrants of Urbana-Champaign. It was re...

Today Beth Chasco e-mailed me with an interesting idea. She said that she would like to combine the Spanish conversation table with a community service project. I thought that was a wonderful idea! I think that this would be an interesting way to bring students together for a good cause. Plus I thought that the project she proposed was particularly relevant to the Spanish 232 classes. Beth told me that there is a Hispanic teacher at Leal School that has been trying to get enough money together so that she can buy a house through Habitat for Humanity. She still needs $20,000 to get a house, which may seem like a lot, but any little step we can help her with would be amazing! Beth was thinking that we could have a salsa night or other type of fund raiser to help her. I’m sure it would be very meaningful for those of you that work with the students at Leal. Plus, I know that the students I work with at Central would love to help out other people in our community. I also thought it would b...

Things were kind of quiet this week at the Refugee Center. Most of the people have their tax forms completed and ready to be mailed. The raffle for the cordless iron and toaster oven was held last week. All in all, the raffle was a huge success and it raised a good amount of money for the Refugee Center. I believe that the raffle funds are being used to pay for utilities like phone lines and the internet. Because the first raffle was such a success, the center is having another one. This time the prizes are a George Foreman grill and a set of kitchen knives. Tickets are only $1 this time and I am sure that they will sell like hotcakes. I am glad that these small fund-raisers are so successful and I look forward to selling lots of tickets in my downtime.

Yesterday I went with my carpool to Central High School only to find that the school was closed! I guess the kids had an extra day off for spring break, but I will go back again to see them tomorrow. Even though I didn’t get to go to Central, I did meet with the Spanish conversation table. It went very well! Since it was our first day meeting, we mostly did introductions and explained our Spanish background and what kinds of things we hoped to get from the conversation table. Everyone was very positive and encouraging of each other. We also talked about ideas for future meetings. For next week we asked the students to think of a cuento they could tell. We were also thinking that we could read news articles in Spanish one week, and even have a game of Scrabble in Spanish (I have the Spanish version of Scrabble at my apartment). I’m excited! If you have any other ideas, I would love to hear from you! We are meeting next Monday at 5 pm in 1128 FLB if you would like to join us. We are alwa...

Pattsi Petrie is in the service learning reading group that I attend and that Valeri Werpetinski organizes on the UIUC campus. She sent along a message this morning about a service learning conference that looks very interesting. Click here to see more about it . Erasing Boundaries—Supporting Communities A Symposium on Interdisciplinary Service-Learning in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning Location: Shepard Hall, The City College of New York Date: April 4 and 5th 2008 It is very interesting to see how community service learning fits within other disciplines and is deployed in their teaching and professional practice. It is also very interesting to see where disparate disciplines intersect. There is a session focusing on work at Monteverde in Costa Rica, a project that I blogged about earlier . Stacy Harwood is a UIUC faculty member and community service learning practitioner. The session title and participants are: “Sustainable Futures:” Placemaking in Montev...

Things are still really busy at the Refugee Center. A lot of people are still coming with questions about taxes and insurance. I have mostly been taking phone messages and filing documents. I have had the chance to talk to some of the immigrants about their plans for this spring, and almost all of them are staying in Champaign. Some people have family visiting, but I do not think that any of them are really taking a vacation. Nevertheless, it seems that both the employees and the immigrants at the Refugee Center are enjoying the warm weather. Sixty degrees and snowless weather is enough to keep everyone’s spirits high, including my own, despite not having a spring vacation. -Chris

The Immigration Policy Center's tagline is: "providing factual information about immigration in America." Certainly, we need to provide our students with facts in order to counteract the rhetoric on immigration in the US that is often simply based on emotions and false assumptions. The website for their project, "Immigration OnPoint" looks very useful. Click here to see it . Facts are important and should be part of the academic content in any Spanish community service learning course, yet I continue to be amazed at the power of individual stories in my courses as well. You can read all the fact sheets that you want, but when students interact closely for an entire semester with immigrants they gain a new, personalized perspective on the immigration debates. But personal stories aren't enough. It's too easy for some students to form a positive relationship with certain individuals without extrapolating to the broader issues. Websites like Immigrati...

Here are a few of the pictures I took at the international fair this week at Central High School. It was so much fun to see all of the kid’s projects! They were all so happy that we came in to see them and they gave us montones of food to try. Everything tasted great! It was very interesting to see the differences between the projects of the students that were born in other countries and the students born here in the United States. The booths that the students from our ESL class made were very bright and colorful. Their posters were covered in pictures and they printed out lots of interesting facts about their native countries. Most of them had a large variety of traditional food that they had made with their families. One of the most interesting things I had was a dessert from Viet Nam. It was sort of like a Jell-O dish, but the flavor was stronger and the texture was thicker. Over all, the international students did a wonderful job! On the other hand, the American born students did n...

I have been e-mailing back and forth with Beth Chasco, the Spanish Advisor, and it looks like we will be setting up a Spanish conversation table! I will be running it along with a few other Spanish majors. Our first meeting will be on Monday March 24 at 5 pm. We do not have an exact location yet but I will post something as soon as I know. We are going to try and make it a weekly thing to meet and practice Spanish every Monday night. Each week there will be a topic or some sort of activity to do in Spanish. It’s the perfect thing if you just came back from a study abroad trip and you don’t want to lose your level of fluency. It’s also good practice for people who haven’t been abroad but still want to improve their Spanish. So if you want to, please come! I would love to see you all there and don’t hesitate to bring any Spanish speaking friends! I would also like to add that tomorrow from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. the students of Champaign Central High School are putting on an internationa...

I have been sick for the past 10 days and have not posted anything here during that time. (Thank goodness for Chris and Liz who continued to send their posts so that the blog wasn't totally dormant during that time.) But I'm happy to be back at work today, even if I still don't have my voice back yet. One of the great things about being back at work is that I was able to attend Valeri Werpetinski's service learning reading group again today. We always have very interesting discussions, and Val always sends us interesting bibliography and news about opportunities in service learning. I'm copying below her latest updates: ***SCHOLARSHIP OF ENGAGEMENT OPPORTUNITIES*** 1. 19TH ANNUAL NATIONAL SERVICE-LEARNING CONFERENCE: YOUTH FOR A CHANGE April 9-12, 2008 - Minneapolis Convention Center The National Service-Learning Conference is the largest annual gathering of those involved in the service-learning movement. Sponsored by the National Youth Leadership Council, the...

This is a picture of the office at Ivanhoe Park, which is a community for mobile homes. I have recently worked with several different people who live in this area. I served mainly as a translator between the families and the management at the office. Most of the problems have been about small details in the contracts or insurance policies. There are many Hispanic immigrants that live in this area. I feel that I am becoming more involved in Champaign-Urbana’s Hispanic community by going to places like Ivanhoe and helping the families of the Refugee Center. -Chris

Photo: students at Central High School, where Liz does her community service learning. I just wanted to reflect on the article we read this week in class about the fact that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement was here in Champaign. I guess I just didn’t realize that people we are working with in our community partners are directly at risk of being deported. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to be shipped out of the country with less than 24 hours notice. I also feel bad for the children because I feel like their lives can change so quickly and there is nothing they can do to stop it. In class we were talking about how the children are often left behind without their parents because the children are protected as US citizens (if they were born here). It just doesn’t seem right to me that families can be split up on the spot like that. I really hope that in our generation the laws on immigration are changed. I don’t think that closing the borders is the right solution. I...

The Refugee Center has been extremely busy lately. There have been a lot of court sentences handed down; the workers at the center are trying to find legal counsel and explain court procedures to many immigrants. There have also been a lot of problems with “Kidcare”, a health insurance program for children. But the majority of visitors at the Refugee Center have come with questions about their taxes. April is approaching fast and these citizens want to make sure that they have everything sorted out before the end of March. I can help immigrants with their taxes in a limited fashion. Sometimes they have signed on the wrong line or made other paperwork mistakes, and in these cases I can help them correct their errors. But if they have a detailed question about naming dependents or other matters, I must defer them to more knowledgeable workers at the center. Some of the workers at the center are practically experts at filing taxes and other forms for the IRS, so I am confident that the im...

A few weeks ago in Spanish 232 we were talking about the cultural differences between the schools in Latin America and the United States. In class we talked about how geography is often taught differently and the instructors may teach the students that there are five continents because they consider North America and South America to be one big continent. There is nothing wrong with that, it’s simply a cultural difference. It made me think more about my experiences abroad. While I was in Ecuador, I worked with several different age groups and I wanted to talk in more detail about the differences I saw while I was there. Some of them are subtle, but it just might help explain why some students from Latin America are overwhelmed by the United States school system. First of all, at the daycare center I volunteered at, I noticed that the students were already learning to be bilingual even at such a young age. Many times they would have short stories in Spanish and in English and if the stu...

There seems to be a lot of news lately about illegal immigration. A week ago, the police raided a Minuteman’s home and found ropes, knives, and guns that he apparently used to intimidate immigrants. Congress also passed a law allowing for the creation of a 28 mile high-tech fence along the Arizona border. The law was passed last week and they will start building the fence as soon as possible. While I realize why some people might be terrified of undocumented immigrants, this kind of news still makes me grimace. How can US citizens hate immigrants so much that they assault them, kidnap them, and abandon them on the other side of the border? I have not talked to anybody at the Refugee Center about crossing the border, but I am sure that many of them have. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that some of these nice people might have been hunted by so-called “Minutemen” on their way to America. I also admire the courage of those who have crossed the border- not only does the walk take ...