What factors in Haiti led to Haitians choosing to come to America to peruse the American Dream?
What displacement did these refugees face in North Korea? What displacement are they they facing?
What different factors lead to homelessness and why is it so hard for people to get out of it?
In the show Reign, Mary becomes the queen of Scotland at six years old. She is put into an engagement to the prince of France at an even younger age. Due to political/ religious conflict in Scotland Mary’s mother sends her to live in a nunnery in France to keep her safe. Years later, Mary had to leave the nunnery because someone attempted to poison her. In the clip I posted bellow, Mary is arriving at the french court and seeing her future husband for the first time since they were little kids. This relates to the clips we watched in class of Superman, Unbreakable and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air because she is new to the French court and now is expected to live out the rest of her live there. However, Mary is a “fish out of water” because she is a Scot and as the queen of Scotland she must always put the needs of her country before all else. This makes her completely different from those around her because they are all French, including her fiance, therefore they must put the needs of France before all else. Mary struggles to assimilate with the French needs. However, because she is a royal after some time she is able to accustom herself to their lifestyle.
Most of my closest friends are Latina. We get along extremely well and I love each of them. We laugh together, cry together and burst into spontaneous musical theater numbers together. Most of the time I fit right in, and I forget that we come from different ethnicities. Then moments happen like what I experienced during our recent get together. During the middle of tell a story one of my friends said something in Spanish that made everyone in the group laugh, except for me of course because I don’t speak Spanish. As usual, in this situation I just sat, waiting for the laughter to die down and for some one to explain it to me. Whenever this situation arises my connection with my closest friends feels as though it is beginning to shrivel away. I can’t relate to their laughter and instantly feel as though I don’t belong in this friend group. Many times I would hate myself for not learning Spanish in middle and high school, and I would wish that I was born into a Spanish speaking family. In a matter of seconds, I went from feeling like I belonged to feeling so displaced I just wanted to get up and leave (which sometimes I actually did when I first started feeling this displacement). Displacement is a feeling that can come at any moment of life; even when you are surrounded by people you love.
The event I went to was “Play The Blue In One Simple Lesson.” In this event a music professor at Baruch taught us the basic cords needed to successfully play the blues. She taught us that to play the blues we need to use the first, fourth, and fifth roots of a key. She then sat at the piano and played us an example of incorporating those roots into a Blues song. Then the fun part came. Each person in the room got a chance to sit at the piano and learn how to play the cords and even how to add more notes to them to make a simple chord sound more embellished. In the end we left learning more than just about the blues. We learned a technique musicians use to make the piano would like a harp. We learned how to do a glissando on the piano, which is when the musician slides their finger continuously up or down between two notes.
At first I was a little nervous to do this event because I thought we would be using complicated instruments. When I entered the room and there was only a piano I was relieved. This event was very enjoyable to me. The professor was very encouraging of us. The professor was also very patient with us and was open to answer what every questions we had about music in general or playing the blues specifically. This helped me to feel like there was no pressure to be perfect, and comfortable enough to actually be one of the first people to volunteer to try playing on the piano. This event was especially interesting for me because I haven’t played the piano since ending my music class senior year of high school. Doing this blues lesson was actually an eye opening event for me. It made me realize that because I haven’t practiced music in almost a year some of the knowledge was leaving me. After going to this event, I’m actually motivated again to keep learning and rehearsing my piano playing and music reading.
