61 Nepali kids session
We had been told the condensed 10 minute story during an assembly, and I remember thinking that it was completely not ‘right’ per se, for the University of Texas at Tyler to revoke 61 Nepali already legally accepted students with full-ride scholarships. I really only understood a little of the impact it had on the kids’ lives. Now, after hearing the story again, it made me realise exactly how unfair it was for the university to do that, especially after she recognised the ‘conveniency of the timing’ on their end. Number one, not notifying the kids until April 13th, after the universal deadline – the first – of their revoked scholarships. Not only is this relatively unheard of, so completely unexpected (on the Nepali side), but also past the time where it would impact their other students’ enrolment. Second, that the overall state of the US politics – Trump giving ‘voices to racists’, etc. – could have been a potential factor in their decision to revoke their seats, and not own the mistake, knowing that legally, it would fly.
Fostering children session
What I found most interesting was hearing from an actual foster parent, I was kind of expecting the speaker to be a foster kid, and I don’t have any idea why. I expected the story to be sad, but that it would kind of be like ‘oh ya it turned out okay, I’m here’, but that was not correct. What really struck me was the way he was talking about David – the boy who he fostered for the longest time – how he kept going back to how he couldn’t let go of his mom and it impacted his behaviour. Even the perspective of a parent seemed interesting to me, like how he noticed that how his telling David off made him feel like he was pushing him away, which is clearly not what he wanted, so he had to not do it the conventional way. Especially interesting to me was how he made the observation when he went back and visited David nearly 10 years after they put him back into the foster care system, just after his sister gave birth and was being a good mother, did he finally realise his mom ‘failed him‘ and that it wasn’t his fault, and did he move on with his life. Even that the ‘moral’ in a sense, from him, was that you have to recognise when a relationship is failing, and not hide from it.