After returning to Monterey from Los Angeles, a certain weight and heavyness fell over me, I had started to bring back all the knowledge and information I had acquired while in L.A to my home setting of Monterey. The harder I tried to ignore the feelings of guilt and how I lived in such luxury , the more it pricked at my conciense, Monterey being one of those places within the state where the rich poor divide is pretty stark and the use and plunder for activities like the Pebble Beach golf Course at the expense of many other individuals acquiring basic necessities like water or even food. I wanted to share how exactly I felt about the very broken and messed up system I had come to know while in L.A which I also realized each and every one of us were a part of, and that hurt more.
A couple of weeek after we returned we were to have a presentation with the Immersive learning group that went to Mindanao, Phillipines to share our experiences and learnings with the rest of our peers and Professors at the Middlebury Institute. The opportunity to actually put into reality what I had been obsessing over for the past couple of weeks sounded exhilirating , almost therapeutic, and to share it with all my group mates and another group that had travelled s
tudying much of the same issues was a welcome chance. When I was younger I was very into the theatre and the power of play acting and method acting to empathize about situations that are harder to understand. I was very blessed during the presentation preparation to be given the chance to use my past experience within this sphere of role playing to express what I had learned and understood while in L.A. I wrote a play with the help of my peers that tried to do justice to the lessons and the experiences we had been through and three topics stood out for us, gang violence, homelessness and mental disability. Through three short and powerful skits we put forward our vision of what L.A was like to us, what the everyday average Joe goes through and how those difficulties relate to the larger themes playing throughout L.A. Like one of the larger themes we connected to gang violence within our role playing context was police and law enforcement brutality.This issue to us, explained largely what the racial minorities and a lot of the populations that have difficulties with gang violence deal with and why they look at the law enforcement with such mistrust and reservation. We also played into the importance of education and how the lack of a strong and stringent education system within the areas where racial minorites and low income families reside is a very dire issue that must be addressed to ensure a more integrated and content immigant and overall population.
The possibility to act out and play into the ideas and themes we had witnessed in L.A was more of a blessing than words can do justice. The most beautiful part to me was that the parts played in the role play about the L.A experience were played by persons from the Mindanao trip and the L.A trip, the idea that we could relate to these individuals who werent even there to take in the everyday the way we had were still able to grasp what we were trying to impart, and that is worth to me more than I imagined. That was my biggest notion of understanding, sharing the experiences we had and went through were as important if not more important that going through the experiences in the first place, and for that I and eternally thankful to this course but more importantly the City of Angels.
