Beginning my work at the Feerick Center, I felt as though I were a fisherman (or a bear) thrown at the edge of a healthy stream filled with determined fish making their way to spawn in the Spring. I had to catch the fish right or they would slip outside of my reach. Right after orientation, during which we met and greeted people and learned our way around the quadrilateral path leading to offices, food, drink and printers (very important), I rushed from one meeting to the next, reading hundreds of pages worth of information in an hour, synthesizing such information, and participating in the conversation using what brain power I had left. The days were as lengthy and confusing as the sentence before this one. Yet, I had never felt so excited to be in a place so busy, because I felt that the goals of the Center aligned with those that have always led my heart.
As much as any other blog you will find here, this blog might be about passion and strange new things. It might also contain dubiously appropriate comments that may betray that the author is still (hopefully) developing a sense of introspection and accumulating an understanding about certain things – paternalism, gender issues, racialization, inequality… It will detail experiences and events and convey helpful information along the way, such as this:
The Feerick Center for Social Justice is an organization based in Fordham University School of Law, located in New York City, where the tourists flank either side of Lincoln Center and Columbus Circle. The Feerick Center, started in 2006 by the vision of John Feerick, is host to many wonderful programs and activities. It aims to address problems surrounding urban poverty, educate law students, serve low-income communities, and energize practicing attorneys through a variety of programs. In the first week, I mainly participated in the Center’s CLARO program. CLARO is the Civil Legal Advice and Resource Office, which provides limited legal advice to debtor-defendants on consumer debt cases filed against them. CLARO is an equalizing force in a debt industry that is ready to file case after case, fishing for a default judgment in order to collect on charged off debt that is being circulated in the industry as a type of security. On the whole, the Feerick Center is focused on social justice, and I came to participate in it with my fervent belief that true social justice is primarily achieved by pointing that focus on Human Rights.
I was selected to work with the Unaccompanied Immigrant Children Project. The UICP was born out of a conference hosted by the Feerick Center, which focused on the topic of immigrating children, who are coming to the United States on their own. Since then, the number of immigrant children coming to the United States has multiplied, and with each step of the journey comes different sets of Human Rights Issues – from the factors that compel children to leave (push factors), to their treatment at country borders, and then to settlement. The challenge of participation is exacerbated when the category – children – has historically been given little agency in the United States (and other places). We still like to think of our children, all “under eighteen or twenty-one,” as semi-adults – somewhat not fully capable of whatever adulthood is supposed to mean. The reality for me is that I don’t think anyone really knows what adulthood truly means, but we endow such a word and such a concept, with institutional powers – legal, social, economic, and cultural privileges, whose effects can be empowering or pernicious as you may hopefully find out in later posts.
Challenging how we normally view children and how it can affect the aspect of participation in the Human Rights Framework is also an important topic. However, it is not what this post is about (or maybe it has already been). It is about general physical alienation. During the week, I was not sure about how to stay committed to my goal of applying participatory action when I was always in some random office X. In the heat of the first 80 degree summer day of New York City, I felt confused about attaining this goal. How much does participation figure into my work when the impacted person views me as volunteer number 3, who sits on the hallway down the left, after you make a right and three doors down (this is not where I actually sit, which is more accurately in a building by Columbus Circle, up 9 floors through an elevator, through a bolted door, and then going in and left twice)? How do I, the advocate with a clipboard calling client number 42, do what I can to reach out? How will they lead me when I barely see them? How will I follow? These are the questions I am still trying to figure out.
For such a problem, the Feerick Center is my stream. In the Philippines, when the heat of the summer rose, everything around me seemed to melt. It would get so hot that I would sometimes feel confused within the heat’s coercion. Then, there was this stream. I met with it once, took off my shoes, and rinsed my feet in its shallow current. As my world blazed around me, I found a home at the soles of my feet. The cool water gave me hope. The stream’s current gave me direction. I would take a sip of the water to try out the product of industrious rocks refining its composition. As streams are, the sweetness of the water cupped in your hands is a measure of your thirst (not the actual taste of the water). This week, I was thirsty.
Thus, every day I attended every possible conference call, took on every possible task, asked as many questions as I could, and read a lot of things (fiction, biographies, studies, legal documents). Doing all of it, I pondered how to practice rights-based, participatory action when I barely met with the impacted person. I pondered the question when conference call five was nine flights up and the second door to the right from the locked door. I am probably too immaturely anxious to see the literal manifestation of a concept I have decided to live by. Nevertheless, I pondered the question when I went up another elevator ride, through an office door, through a hallway, past a stack of files, and into a door in a table when the answer struck me – the meeting where I was veritably star struck.
When I was only a few years old, I thought I knew a lot about immigration and traveling to other countries. In the Philippines, anyone who left the country was, as I understood it then, outside of the world (“naa sa gawas”) so by the time I was three I had several mothers – all sisters and relatives of my “mama sa gawas” (my real mother, the one outside) and people I call endearingly with variations of mother as the honorific to their names – Mama, Nanay, etc. However, I still felt a strong sense of attachment to the one that wasn’t there – whose honorific, though similarly “Mama,” was not a variation when I spoke it, but the original. I was able to speak to her in calls, and she occasionally came back to visit, and thus she must have been visible. As much as she existed outside my world, she was still there connected to me. She reached out to me, and I reached out to her – in small interactions, only the few short minutes available to her and to me. Her physical absence did not impede her from knowing the entirety of my life, and allowing me to participate in hers. I resorted to looking up at the stars, believing that such a visible thing is both close enough, though outside the world, to have been her residence. Motherhood and the stars were equivalent in my eyes.
It seems I have gendered the role of stars to conform to my experience. Nevertheless, my mind seemed to have turned a key to unlocking my confused search to find the answer to my alienation. In that meeting was a room full of stars: their daily work was just as buried behind elevator floor 3 and hallway 4. Yet, though they were outside, it was their hearts that reached out to the people they were eager to help. All of them, mothers in my eyes in some capacity – their thoughts doing their best to dwell with the community, and some part of me felt that the community was at least close enough.
It is no wonder my director reminds me of the galaxy. As if containing a billion little stars twinkling in my night sky, she seems to have mastered the conveyance of a dozen emotions in only a few words. In a fifteen minute conversation, you could convey to her a lifetime. It is almost as if she already knew. I guess because she is as the Milky Way – containing all these stars, and within it our Earth, home to all these people.
Participation of the impacted communities is the most important aspect in the Human Rights Framework. It is often easy to be paternalistic and to approach the problem only through our view, and our experience. It is much harder to view the problem as the person, who was affected, would see it – they bring more than a singular issue whenever they give the few minutes we have for conversation. I think that being able to understand the way another person has lived the world is only a part of the participation model, but it is a conceptual step that is important though difficult to make. The UICP has several projects including participatory research that brings this aspect more concretely – to which I am looking forward.
