WOW! I was very entertained and impressed by the performances I saw at the Vagina Monologues on Friday night. At the beginning they gave us permission to shout, laugh out loud and cry and I certainly did all 3!
Diversity is something that I have become much more acquainted with during my time at Iowa State. Growing up in a small town where I graduated with a class of 86, was in my opinion, lacking in diversity. Coming to Iowa State was a huge jump in that department. Suddenly I was surrounded by people from different countries, cultures, religions and basically everyone was different and diverse in their own way! It took some getting used to. However, diversity was never something that I was afraid to accept, I met many great people in my first few weeks at ISU and have continued to in my 3 years here. The people that I have met, no matter what their background, have enriched my college experience and made me grow in many ways. Cultural differences that I have experienced have been living with people from different races, working with people that have a very different religious beliefs than myself and simply meeting people from all walks of life that walk a little bit different than myself.
An understanding of diversity and the importance of it is something that I believe will be very helpful to us as Peer Mentors. We will have students who much like myself and I'm sure many of the other mentors too, will have come from communities where diversity was never a discussion topic. As we said in class, being Hixson scholars and all of us being from Iowa, there may not be a lot of huge differences between us, but there will be some and we will be helping the students to deal with their new diversity experiences in college.
Kudos to the performers in the Vagina Monologues this weekend, excellent work and very touching current topic about the women of the Republic of Congo. Makes me realize how important it is to know what is going on in the rest of the world so that we can work to change what really needs to be changed.
Power to the People!
Lisa Tronch
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Lisa,
ReplyDeleteStoked to see your openness and receptivity to issues of diversity. It's interesting to think through what aspects of our backgrounds cause varying responses when we experience culture shock (ie coming to ISU from a small town). I imagine you'll have an opportunity to explore this with students having both very similar and very different responses to yours. I'm confident you'll do quite well when faced with that scenario.
-Heath