The final two days of my senior project were rather anti-climatic; I finalized our defense and school-wide presentations, went to AP Microeconomics, and watched a documentary on Guatemala and the civil war that that Salvador had recommended to me.
Obviously, the most exciting part was the documentary, Discovering Dominga. Here's PBS's description of the one-hour documentary:
"When 29-year-old Iowa housewife Denese Becker decides to return to the Guatemalan village where she was born, she begins a journey towards finding her roots, but one filled with harrowing revelations. Denese, born Dominga, was nine when she became her family’s sole survivor of a massacre of Mayan peasants. Two years later, she was adopted by an American family. In Discovering Dominga, Denese’s journey home is both a voyage of self-discovery that permanently alters her relationship to her American family and a political awakening that sheds light on an act of genocide against this hemisphere’s largest Indian majority."
It was incredible moving; when Salvador first described the documentary to me, he actually started to tear up a little. It hit closer home for him than it did me, since Guatemala and its citizens still face the consequences of the decades-long genocide committed by the military dictatorship against the indigenous people. I really can't even describe how horrified I was by what I saw and learned from this documentary, and how even more awful I felt knowing that the US played a part in supporting this. But, there was also a sense of hope - a sense of community, of family, of history, a sense that things could and would get better. I highly recommend it anyone interested in learning more about Guatemala or their civil war.
Like I said, I also finished up our presentation! It's the same slideshow, but there are two different presentations: one is five minutes, will be presented to the school in the Senior Project Assembly, and focuses more on the "logistics", if you will, of our project. The other is 30 minutes long, will be our defense presentation, and has to do more about what we think we got out of the project - our feelings on travel and service, how we've changed or grown as people, aspects of the project we did and didn't like, etc. I think both are going to go very well!
I'm really glad we've had this last week to prepare for our presentations. Especially since I've gotten the chance to present our project three times already, I'm feeling really good! It's weird to think that this is my last post, and that senior projects are officially over. But here we are, and I've loved every minute of it!
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