Be Transformed - Posting By Gail Ostrow

University life is filled with opportunities to learn and grow, often in ways no one can anticipate. Who can say what will have the most influence on you during your time here. A word from a professor may alter the direction of your studies. A line in an assigned reading may stun you. A discussion in class may anger or arouse you. A banner in the Campus Center may halt you in your tracks.

Eight plus years ago my daughter was on her way from San Francisco to visit us here in Connecticut when she met a man who had worked at the Nuremberg Trials. From that brief, unexpected meeting came a journey that culminated in her movie about a Cambodian family’s search for truth and justice, “Out of the Poison Tree.” Everyone who supported her along the way—family, friends, even strangers—became a part of this larger community that now knows about the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath.

And this is what I find so exciting about teaching here at Fairfield. Being part of both the larger university learning community and the smaller one in each of my classes places me right in the middle of all these opportunities to learn and grow. I never know which one of you will transform me—how my perspective may change because of something you say or do.

Like me, you may sometimes find yourself challenged both intellectually and emotionally. Learning can be uncomfortable, especially when the content is controversial or ugly or unpleasant. This is the double-edged sword of knowledge. Once we learn something, be it a fact about long-ago events or a disaster that is unfolding right in front of us, we can’t ever not know it again.

Now that we have read "Lucky Child," we can’t not know about what happened in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 while the world was busy elsewhere. Her story demands that we examine not just the past but also what is happening now in places like Darfur, where ethnic cleansing and genocide have been going on for over four years. There is no better way to honor Luong’s story than to bear witness to and try to stop the atrocities of the present.

Gail

Gail Ostrow
Adjunct Instructor, English

Comments

[Jackie Kremer -Reference Librarian]

Yes, we can be transformed by a chance conversation, a friendship, a book, a movie, a class. Who knows? When I was at college (a Jesuit college), I was taking a history class about Central America. It was here I learned about the death of four North American churchwomen, killed in El Salvador in 1980 by U.S.-trained death squads. It changed my then limited view of the world and my place in it. Tragically, in 1989, six Jesuits and two women who worked with them. were also murdered in El Salvador.

In response to these murders and many other atrocities, each year Fairfield University students, staff, and faculty pile into vans for a road trip to the annual School of the Americas (SOA) protest in Columbus, GA. This is an important tradition, especially for Jesuit Universities, as the date of the protest marks the anniversary of the murder of six Jesuit priests, their maid, and her daughter in El Salvador killed by soldiers trained at the Schools of the Americas.

For more information on the SOA/WHINSEC and the SOA protest, visit the School of the Americas Watch website at http://www.soaw.org/ . To get involved on campus, contact: Conor O'Kane, ext. 2173, cokane@mail.fairfield.edu or Wylie Smith, ext. 2668, wsmith@mail.fairfield.edu at Campus Ministry.