What We Discovered About Ourselves

Volunteering at Fatima Villa has been a great experience for us so far. Our project time in class is coming to an end but we hope to continue our journey of finding people's stories.

From simply filing papers to actually interacting with the people at Fatima Villa, we learned to appreciate all the work people do there. Even filing papers into binders was a difficult task. (Those huge binders were hard to open! And my hand hurt by the end of the day.) It shows us how caring the staff is to each and every patient.

For me personally, interviewing my grandpa really sparked my interest in my own family's history and it was super interesting to talk to a real primary source instead of reading history from a textbook. In addition, I usually only hear stories from my mother, and it was interesting to hear a story from a even earlier generation. Because I often watch Chinese movies with my parents, a lot of the story lines are now put in context for me.

We have discovered that hearing other people's stories has been very enjoyable. Even though we knew that the generations before us were very different, it was a great experience to actually hear specific details and anecdotes about a certain time period. Just learning about history only gives us a general perspective of the time period, and maybe a bias view that the U.S has if we're reading a textbook written by someone in the U.S, but actually hearing the stories from someone who was there brings the event to life.

Personally, for me, listening to all the stories of the people who were willing to share brought yourself to discovery why humanity is just an important aspect. We connect with the pain and joy of our lives and that is how we can inspire others, help them, and hopefully learn from it so we won't make the same mistakes again.

The main goal of this project was to connect with other perspectives about what they had gone through and although not everyone was willing to share we did learn a lot about why we are so similar and different about culture and as time progressed how we went about certain situations.
The stories we were able to listen to has formed a special bond within us and now we can be more accepting of people and perhaps if more people do this as well people won't judge as much as they too and instead they can focus on the good.