Assignment #6 - Privilege

I can't believe many of you are nearing the end of your adventure! Some of you are already home. My how time flies when you are having fun. I have two more assignments for you to work on, this being second to last. Even if you are on your way back to Canada, you can work on these when you get back.

Back when I was in Costa Rica for a year, I was doing my best to live like a Tica. My friends were local, I ate local, I spoke Spanish and indeed I was naive enough to believe that I was "one of the people". I distinctly remember chatting with a good friend about some of the challenges that we faced where we were working when my paradigm shifted. We were agreeing on certain issues when he flattened me with reality by saying "Yeah, but you can leave at any point and go back to your nice life in Canada". I was working so hard to fit in that I completely lost track of the fact that I am not Tica and never will be, particularly because I am privileged enough to come from Canada. I was also privileged enough to be in a position where I could take a year off from my life and hang out in Costa Rica.

I looked for a definition on privilege as it relates to international travel but couldn't find anything that I liked. One of the classic works on white privilege is Unpacking the Invisible Napsack - http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html. Take a look and you will see how privilege can manifest itself.

For this blog assignment, I would like you to look critically at your international internship and try to identify a) if you are indeed privileged and b) how did/does that privilege manifest itself.

My personal belief is that if you can identify when your privilege is in play, you can counteract the negative effects of it. It is a tough thing to do. When my Costa Rican friend identified the HUGE distance between us, I had a really hard time with it. But it was a lesson well learned and to which I endeavor to be sensitive of.