Immigration Project Reflection

Literature Circle Books/Blogs

The book that I had to read was Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat. When choosing my book this was my first chose and I am very happy that I was able to read this book. This book is a powerful book about the hardship that many people face when moving to a new country and leaving another country. This book also showed how hard it can be to get into this country, but how great it can be once you get in America. From reading this book I have learned a lot more about Haiti history and the many hard times the people of Haiti had to go through. I also learned about how horrible things that could happen to a person if the government of America believe that you are an illegal immigrant.

For this project instead of meeting in a group to discuss the book, we had to post what we think about the book in our blogs. There are many things that I really liked about this way of doing blogs, and there are things that I don’t like about working with the blogs. The things that I liked when working with the blogs, was that we got to focus on the two quotes that affected the book. The things that I didn’t like about working on the blogs was that we had all of our meetings online instead of in person, and I liked when we had in person meetings better then doing all of our meets online. When working with the blogs some problems that I had was that some people would write little posts and they didn’t add much detail when posting, so it was hard to really understand why they would like a quote and why they thought that it was significant in the book.

Art and Literature

When I was choosing what painting that I wanted to have, I didn’t know if I wanted to create a new cover for the book or create a important scene from the book. I liked both of these ideas because I was able to have lots of freedom when creating my paint, but finally I decided that I was going to create a new cover for my book. I decided that I wanted to create a book cover because I thought that this would be a good way of expressing what I thought about the book and I would be able to make something new for the book. When making my book cover I didn’t really know what to do at first. Then I started thinking about the different things that happened in the book, and what the author was trying to show in the book or how she felt in when immigrating. In the end I wanted to create a book cover that showed how the author felt when she was leaving.

When making a book cover you have to make a big connection to the book, so in my painting I thought that I made a connection through my painting because I created what I believed the author felt when immigrating to America. I think that because my book had such a big message and the author talked a lot about how she felt, so it was very easy to create a connection between my painting and the book that I read.

I think that my painting turned out okay because I think that I could have added more things to make it look more detailed, but I did what I wanted to do which was to show the two parents and the two countries that the author was caught in between. I think that I could have enhanced my final painting by adding more detail to the painting. I think that I could have also redone the America, because I feel like I could have redone it to make it look better and cleaner.

Interview Process with Participant and Gift

For my interview process I was given Mrs. Abbassi, which is Ms. Abbassi mother. Ms. Abbassi’s parents live up near San Francisco, I wasn’t able to have an in person interview, but one email interview, and two phone interviews. When interview Mrs. Abbassi, I think that I was able to get a lot of important information about her immigration experience. I think that our interviewing process went very well because Mrs. Abbassi was able to share a lot of information with me, and I really understood what she went through when immigrating. I also got to learn a lot about how she misses her home country of Iran, and how America has affected her life, and her children’s life.

I think that one of the reasons that my interview went so smooth was because I got to learn a lot more of Iran from the information that we had to collect about our interviewees country. When collecting the information, I learned that I really didn’t know that much about Iran, and because we had to fill out the fact sheet, I was able to learn a lot more about Iran. So in the end I was very happy that we had the many fact sheets, because in the end I learn more about Mrs. Abbassi’s home country, Iran.

When interviewing, I liked interviewing on the phone the best because when emailing sometimes the people wouldn’t elaborate on their answers, but when we were on the phone you were able to get a more detailed answer. I wish that I was able to have an in person interview because I think that I would have liked that even more, but I also liked doing my phone interview as well.

With this project we got to learn a lot about immigrants from reading about their experiences in books, but I think that because we were able to talk to an individual immigrant, each of us were able to learn more then any book could tell us. When interviewing our individual immigrant we were able to learn about their story and hear they have to tell us about their life and how it has been affected by immigrating. If each of our were to not interview an immigrant, I don’t think that we would have learn and get all the information that we now have.

When I was going to make my gift I was going to make a painting, a calendar, or a scapebook. Mrs. Abbassi ended up choosing a painting for her gift. When she was explaining what we wanted in a gift, she said that she didn’t want any flags in the painting, and she wanted something that was netural in both countries, Iran and America. So for my painting I choose to make two types of flowers that had to do with both places that she had lived in. The California state flower, Poppy and the national flower of Iran, which was the red rose. So in my painting I made one side of my paintings poppys, and the other side roses so that they come together in the middle. So I wanted to show that America and Iran can come together to create something new.