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Democracy Now! Digital Reflection

Democracy Now Digital Reflection

           While interviewing Tanya I learned a lot, she was born in Ukraine and lived there right up to the time she was going to turn 16. This was very stressful because she was up for adoption and the oldest age you can be is 16. She also has an older sister who still lives in Ukraine, but visits. At 15 a family from the USA came to visit her with a translator. She did not speak very good English other than basic adjectives and nouns like a bed, or good. When she came to the US, she was a sophomore in high school and was working with a language teacher in school, she made good progress in learning English. But was still very shy up until her senior year. She is now a student at Nashua Community College and has made plenty of new friends, her English also improved immensely for such a short amount of time. Still living with her family, she continues to learn every day.

           In class, we learned about nonverbal communication, and there was a ton of it during our interview. Her facial features while talking added another layer of emotion to our conversation, I could really tell when something was sad for her to talk about. Like when bringing up her sister who is still in Ukraine, she was very happy when talking about visiting. I also used non-verbal by nodding my head and saying yes while listening to her answers. The Environment of our interview I think took away from the experience, there was a lot of background noise and other people walking around. The most important part of communication that we used though was listening, I took notes to help retain information as well as an audio recording to help with the overload of information we got. Critical listening was used because I asked a lot of follow up questions like, why or when.

           Personally, I learned that I’m more attached to this than I thought. My parents came from Brazil at the age of 20 with nothing knowing very little English, they had to work very hard to get their citizenship and jobs. I knew the struggle she had gone through because I saw my parents go through this very tough battle.

Throughout this whole experience, the thing I most thought about was how glad I was that there are agencies working out there to find orphans in less fortunate countries’ safe homes. The children also come in as US citizens and are given all the tools they need to learn about the language and culture. This can be a shock at first Tanya said she saw someone sitting on the floor and on the table during lunch on her first day, this would have never been allowed in her school. It also gave me an insight into what other parts of the world are doing to help. Many other countries have agencies taking in orphans from all over.