...it was about time

     The day has come, finally. During this whole semester I dreamed about this moment, the moment when I wrote this closing blog post. As you may have notice by the way I wrote on my posts I am not a writer neither a reader. At least not in the literary artistic sense because I do like to read other stuff. You may be asking why did I enrolled in this Journey, well I did because I had to. This has been a very demanding assignment, I had never wrote so much in my whole life.

When they told me I had to make a blog for this class

    I was waiting for this day since the day I had to open the gmail account. For me writing is not very attractive and I have never been prone to do so by myself. I come from a school that inculcates Science and mathematics from an early age. They did have a humanities program in which the more creative students had the opportunities to express them self and had the space to create. But I was not one of those students I was in the realm of science and mathematics from early on. Being so I like to learn and discover not create, because I don't believe you can create knowledge you can only discover it and make it available. The easy post were the ones I just needed to tell an experience like the tourist for a day one. The hard one were the ones I needed to read some piece of literature and write about some aspect of it. Those were a headache.

     So why did I enrolled in a class were I had to make a blog and write an average of 4.667 blog per month? Well I did int knew. But really I did int though it would be so hard and time consuming. One of the reasons I think this was so hard for me its because I have a structure of writing that was first establish in my 10th grade. This one was general, an essay. I remember that my first graded essay had to be a persuasive essay. I did it about the dangers of drinking sugared beverages, especially sodas. It was what we consider in Natural Sciences, tertiary literature, because it was an article based on other sources that were not necessarily primary literature which are papers published in Scientific Journals that have been subject to peer review. So then that structure was reinforced and molded to the scientific way of writing when I arrived to college. When I encountered with this project that the writing is based on non concrete things it was a shock to the structure on my head. I did not knew were to start how to organize the ideas. That's with out mentioning the creative and interactive part of it, making hyperlinks, making the page look pretty, adding images. This is something I don't even remember doing in high school and even less so in college. So when I though I was finished I had to go back and start to see what could I do to make my post look more interesting. That could easily take an hour.

     The great thing about this experience of making a blog post is that it is really practical and useful. This can be a great way to build an audience for some kind of business. I believe the greatest benefit I have gained from this is not the creative writing but the practical skill of having a blog and managing it. In today's world this is a great tool.

Every time I had no ideas for the blog post's.

On "A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincade

     A Small Place by Jamaica Kincade, talks about the Britain's colonizers in Antigua, during colonial times and about how they influenced in all aspects of the local culture like politics, economy, social and cultural traditions. Her tone is very sarcastic but with a littel bit of hate and anger in it. Essentially the writing is direct attack towards the colonizers. Completely normal I would say.

     As a Puerto Rican I can relate very easy with this writer. Being born it to one of the last colonies in the world puts me in the same place as this writer but I don't share all of her opinions and attitudes against my colonizer. But this was not always the case. In my house and my whole family are statehooders with means they agree with the American presence in the island and that they would like to become part of the republic. But since I can remember I was always more of a "Lefty" kind of guy the idea of indecency was always of great passion to me. The ideals of the Puerto Rican Nationalist's party and of the Independent party resonated with me and I always had something to say about the topic. Essentially I was OK with the facts that we were subject to the approval of another nation criteria in every aspect of our political, legal an economic themes the only one in which we had "freedom" was in our cultural aspect. I was one of this guys who always had something bad to say about the "yankees".

     But something happened when I entered college that little by little I started to change my mind. I think the big detonator was my Social Sciences class, yes this sounds like a paradox. The class that everybody takes and gets a little bit of communism into their head was the one I took and completely changed my point of view from a "fuck yankees" to a "yea if you could send a little more money that would be great". I am still in this debate about what do I want for my country and the fact that elections are coming soon puts a little more pressure but I guess that's part of it.

     Kincade exposes that the universities established by the English colonizers were biased and hat the education they provided did not resonate with the island cultural background. Now I am not very sure about how the UPR was founded but I'm pretty sure it was with gringo money and even more so today the university operates with mostly federal funds. So if the education were biased, winch is not, I would not be mad at all because they are the ones paying for it, the least they could expect is to receive some credit for it.

UPRRP Tower.

OAPI Students Activity

     This is a job to compensate for the Literary contest  awards I could not attend. I was not able to attend because I had already confirmed my participation in the OAPI Student Health and Well being
Fair. My participation was in collaboration whit the "Circle of Nutrition and Dietetics" which I am part
off. The activity was held in the Student center from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm. When I arrived at 10 we were assigned a table and some chairs for the display of our educational material. The other tables were
all ready filled with stuff and people were starting to arrive and looking for some brochures and some
souvenirs but we had none of them because the person who had our materials had not yet arrived.
We could not do much because when people looked at our table they saw nothing, it was empty so they did not  even bother asking for information.

     So in the mean while I started to look at things in my surroundings. I looked at the other tables and
there contents, there were some with musical therapy, artistic therapy, dance therapy, sport therapy and
much more. There were others that had free health test like a thyroid test, HIV test between others.
Finally at 11:10 am the person in charge to bring the educational material arrived with it and handed it
to us. We started to organize it and rapidly discussed what we were going to say and not say because
this was a special population we were dealing with. After we had organized and prepared everything people started to approach our table but they were kind of scared to come in close, we don't know why. So as they came in we ask them if they knew what healthy eating was, if they knew what was the "My Plate" representation and if they knew what it meant. Most of them had saw it previously but did not know how to read it and what foods were cataloged behind each category. So our primary job was to educate them on how to make good use of this tools and explain the food groups to them so that they could make better choices. Some of these people looked completely fine and no one would have though that they are OAPI students other were extremely shy and didn't say a word except from "no" and "thanks". The hardest part of the activity was having to give a talk when someone was playing and instrument or something because the volumewas stupid high.

     This experience was really touching for me because I am very sympathetic towards others and having to see a great amount of people not being able to don some things we give for granted or just being different was really hard. Even tough I liked the experience and that it was of great enrichment, I don't see myself working with people with special needs. It takes a great deal of patience and ease characteristics that are not my strong ports. Also in the times that no one was approaching our table and that we were free, we talked and share as partners, we were more than one int the table, so it was also enriching from that part because we shared experiences and our thoughts. Finally the best part of the activity was that we got free food and snacks! That's always a win.

This is not the actual activity but one in wich we were doing the same thing, I dont have one from the OAPI activity.