Reflecting back on my last internship, it almost took me an entire year to digest and begin to understand and articulate the precious moments that built my experience. These caricatures of time, I’m beginning to realize, are so sociologically rich and serve as evidence of the reason I was initially drawn to the sector of public health. As I write this at the office, headphones disconnecting me from the world around me, it’s easy to forget about the disparity between theory and practice that we experience on the field. For instance, just yesterday during Children’s Activities at Los Arcos we had pleasure of being joined by one of the neighborhood girls, a recent immigrant from Kenya. Now, what theory and speculation suggest is the possibility of disjuncture between the room full of Bhutanese refugee children and the girl from Kenya. In practice? It’s absolutely unfounded. Not merely a single child noticed what would so commonly be dubbed by textbooks as “diversity”. In all honestly, neither did I. In fact, I recall handing her a consent waiver on her way out of the Sewa community center. What an excellent time indeed to be reminded that the work we do, though directly serving the Bhutanese community of a single apartment complex in a large metropolitan area, has immense ripple effects on the community at large.
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