I have to say, I had really been looking forward to only
wearing my suit once because I feel so uncomfortable in it, but I had to wear
it again Monday to my real interview. I headed out, got there about 15 minutes
early and finally met my advisor, Aoife (pronounced Efa, like Eva with a F). I
had a good interview, even met the CEO, Killian of the company (he had to go
through the conference room to get to his office; he even joked that I didn’t
need to wear things that nice, which I knew but had to for the interview) and
then met the rest of the staff. It’s a small organization and honestly, it
feels a lot like my SAS job so I’m excited that this will be a good 7 weeks. I
was a bit overwhelmed by all the material she gave me, as the centre deals with
refugees and other asylum seekers, so there is a lot of specific terminology,
laws, procedures, rights, etc that I obviously don’t know and need to
familiarize myself with. Refugees are people who are granted asylum and have mostly
the same rights as Irish citizens, Subsidiary Protection status are allowed to
stay because of safety reasons but aren’t granted the same benefits of refugees
and Leave to Remain aren’t either of the first, but aren’t forced to go back. It
will be ok though, because Aiofe is very attentive and
understanding/reasonable, so she hasn’t expected me to just know these things.
I’ll be doing a hodgepodge of things, from helping her on her project, to
possibly getting to go to a clinic one day to research, essentially whatever
she or someone else needs help with. It’s perfectly fine with me. Only about
two hours after my interview, I went with Aoife, Ian and Peter to a community
information gathering session. This is part of her project and the fourth one
in the community. We send out teams to facilitate discussion with asylum
seekers to figure out their condition – what is going right, what is going
wrong and how to fix it. This is phase 1; for phase 2 they compile and analyze
all the data and write up realistic approaches to fixing the problems. The goal
is that all of these people will be well integrated into Irish society and feel
that they belong and can fully contribute. I helped set-up the session, but it
turned out that the hours must not have worked well because only one lady
showed up (the previous 5 sessions had 12 people show up, which is a good
number for the group size they wanted). So that was a bummer, but those things
happen when you organize an event and hope people show up, it always happens at
least once.
Tuesday,
I got to work early, did more reading, addressed some envelopes and then
started transcribing an interview for Aoife. I have 3 hour long interviews to
transcribe, so after that, I should be an expert at interpreting (and hopefully
imitating) the Irish accent. Wednesday, I went in early because we had another
session, but this time it was with business representatives. Fortunately, they
had to RSVP so we knew we would have a good group. As I was helping set-up, I
went to stand on a chair to put something on the wall, and the seam in my skirt
ripped (the purple thrift store one). Fortunately, it stopped at a still
acceptable (though nearing unacceptable by my standards) length and I found a
safety pin to keep it from going any higher. This was good because I was about
to panic as I obviously didn’t bring a change of clothes and I was about to be
surrounded by professional people. But it worked out, even Aiofe and Ian didn’t
notice it. Anyways, the process is pretty cool. We first have the participants
choose from a large group of photos, 3-4 that describe the positives (refugees
– how they feel included; professionals – how they integrate their workers).
Then they break into groups and discuss why they chose those photos and what
they’re doing that they see as a positive. Then we move to negative – everyone
writes a negative/problem area on a post-it and as a group, they try to group
them and create headers for each group. Then they present them to the group.
From this, they take the headers and group them into categories (or leave them
free-standing if they are their own separate problem). They then rank them
according to which is the most important for their company (or self if the
refugees are doing this). Finally, they work in teams on the issues they found
most important and try to create ways that it can be solved: by self, by self
with help, or by others. This way, the company has lots of information to
really understand what the problems are and which are the common ones (after
comparing this with the data gathered from the other sessions) and can create
realistic approaches that can be implemented in a timely manner. I don’t know
if we do this in the US or have something similar (though I feel like we
should), but it seems very efficient and informative. I think I will have some
very interesting days ahead of me J
By the way, this is their website: http://www.integrationcentre.ie/
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