Immigration Reflection

When I decided to choose this book for my first choice, I knew it probably wouldn't be the same as I pictured it would be like, but when I read it, I found that it was totally different. In my mind, I thought the book would be a book about a guy trying to get through a troubled life by staying happy and comical, but it turned out to be a book about Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese who wandered through a Sudan torn by civil war to Ethiopia where he and everyone he had immigrated with were pushed out by the Ethiopians due to a series of murders, into Kenya where they lived in poverty until they finally found they could go to America where his personal belongings would get stolen and his girlfriend killed. I was satisfied in the sense that it was a very emotional and touching book. But while reading this book, I find the happiness drain out of me and a desire to rip the pages out of the book and change them so Valentino succeeds in life. It's because of this I think that Dave Eggers is a spectacular writer. And beside an amazing ability to put words on paper, this book taught me a lot too. If I hadn't read this book, I wouldn't have understood a thing about what I was hearing on the radio about Darfur. I now understand that Darfur is an area in Sudan where a genocide is happening on behalf of the government. For this reason, and others such as enforcing the sharia, the SPLA formed and attempted to take the government down. But after a while in the book, nobody really knew which side to support, as both sides were killing so many innocents. Therefore, troubles grew and are still growing while showing no signs of dying down. Something I would add to the Literature Circle Process, would be to make us write a letter about immigration to the president of the country we read about. That way, we could express our opinions and find out if we really wanted to do something to help if we had read about a country that was troubled by war or corruption, like ours. Other than that though, I felt that blogging was a pretty good way of displaying our feelings about the book because it's better for the environment to do it on the computer rather than use a lot of paper. Also, I personally like typing more than writing. I think it might have been better for some of the members of my group also, because I found a little bit more out about what they were thinking. I think that some of them saw it in a more comical way than I did because they noticed that Achor Achor is always a very funny and clever character while I didn't notice that at all. So it's true that we didn't see the book in the same way.

That subject aside, however, this was also more elaborate than the previous Literature Circles. I am of course talking about the painting we had to do. I based my painting on how confused and bewildered people can be when they come to a new country and how it can sometimes be damaging. The connection that I was trying to make to the book, was how when the Lost Boys came to America, most of them couldn't understand how everything worked, like when Valentino and Achor Achor put peanut butter and milk in the freezer, and when Valentino was too trusting of strangers and got robbed. The culture crash caused him to be confused and Misfortune saw it as an opening and managed to worm its way into his life. I think that the final product of my painting was able to display all of this very well and I was actually surprised at how well everything turned out. What might have enhanced the final product of my painting, however, would have been to add a little bit more detail. However, I am proud of my work and think I did a very good job on it. It might have looked better with more detail, but I will never know, for there were many aspects of my painting that are good. For example, just by painting it and writing about it, I found out just what I was doing and just what the culture crash really is. So really, my painting helped me help myself understand immigration better.

Moving right along, I am going to change the subject again. Part of the immigration unit required us to interview an immigrant. I think that my interview went very well because my interviewee was very talkative and provided long, well thought out answers. This actually made the fact that I had to interview my immigrant 3 different ways a lot easier than I had thought it would be. Also, in each interview I learned something new. For example, in the first interview, I learned basic things like what their name was and a little bit about Brazil. In the second interview I learned about who they were as a person and what things had been like when they left. And in the third interview, I got a full scale report on what their journey was like. So I learned a lot by being able to meet and interview them, more than any book or movie could have told me, because I was receiving the story first hand from a real immigrant. However, it was sort of a let down that they didn't want the gift I had to make, but I understand that she didn't want extra clutter and felt that it would be less out of place in a place like a library, or being used as an example for next years 8th graders when they have to make a gift and are just as confused as we were.