Coming to an End

I must admit that for the last few days, my consciousness has been filled with nostalgic thoughts. This is the last week that I will be spending with my teachers, and classmates - even if before the past week, I've never engaged in a real conversation with them. Although I realize that there is nothing tangible I will miss, it still feels like I'm about leave a lot behind. Well, at least I know that next time, I'll start talking before the class parts ways.

This has definitely been an interesting year with the new Lower/Upper School model. If it weren't for this year, I would've been blindly ignorant of the important skill sets I've developed over the past year. My job this year, wasn't to only to produce better quality Photoshop work, but to encourage the rookies to do the same.

It feels odd now that there won't be any work I have to stress about. No deadlines - at least for another few months - and most importantly no Thursday Chats. It is mind boggling to think about how accustomed I've gotten to the little things the class has done. The weekly chats with my Latin American friend has been promoted to an after school activity now that we won't have class time to chat with them. I just can't wrap my head around the fact that only about ten chats ago, I was nervous and apprehensive about the direction that the chats would go. Little would I predict that these "School-mandatory chats" would turn into a routine that I would miss. In those chats I would gradually start replacing and breaking some old stereotypes about El Salvador. Week by week, I slowly started to realize that there was more to a country than what the internet portrayed. Google has tons and tons of articles about the gang violence in El Salvador, but almost none about its rich traditions and festivals. I guess there are somethings that Google can't quite teach you. Sadly, I realize that I was one the few lucky people whose gotten such a unique and meaningful experience as this. For the majority, google and the internet is their primary source of information about other countries.

If humans could stop and think for a moment. Before they went to war. Before they voted/supported an agressive act. Before they insult another nation or a group as a whole. Just how alike we all are. How (I don't know about you adults, but for the teens) we all go to school and complain about teachers, homework and college, how we all love the same shows on Netflix and listen to the same "popular bands." Maybe that is how world peace is attained. If we were all to consider the "others" as someone just like us.

Moving forward, I should uses these new lessons and try to live a better life and make/ help decide choices not entirely what I hear about in the news, but to also explore primary sources and formulate my own opinion about the subject.