This is the first installment of a monthly feature on the PACS website. This monthly profile of PACS and MPACS students will give a small snapshot into the pursuits and experiences of our PACS students.
Rachel, a Masters of Peace and Conflict Studies (MPACS) student, spent eight months working with School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) as an MPACS internship. SOAW is a grassroots organization dedicated to shutting down the School of the Americas (SOA), a US military training base in Fort Benning, Georgia that has trained over 65,000 Latin American soldiers who return to their home countries and oppress their own people; targeting students, union organizers, indigenous rights defenders, and peace activists. Graduates also include 11 dictators and many others who have been linked to some of the worst human rights abuses and repression in the region.
Rachel was involved as an organizing intern, but during those 8 months she became a full member of the staff collective and was deeply involved in the organization. SOAW is a grassroots organization, meaning that the organization functions because people who are passionate about the cause donate their time and money; the supporters are heavily involved in the identity and workings of the organization. This was one of the main reasons that Rachel loved working for SOAW and affirmed her desire to work for a grassroots organization in the future.
Every year, SOAW holds a vigil, rally, and 2 day conference in Fort Benning, Georgia to protest the SOA and provide a space for activists to come together in a collaborative space. Rachel’s main task was organizing the conference portion of the vigil, which involved coordinating over 70 workshops and ensuring that everything would run smoothly during the weekend. An anecdote from the experience involves a particularly difficult workshop:
“When I was working on organizing the workshops, one man who was trying to put one on was very eager about the conference and starting in the summer called at least once a month, sometimes once a week. To accommodate him, I had to move around a lot of other components and get him a bigger room and the other things that he needed. It added a lot of stress to the planning, and even the day of he needed a lot of things. I thought to myself, this had better be good for all the effort that was put into it… and when I went up to the workshop that night, it was packed! There was standing room only, people had brought cameras to record and I could see that they were deeply moved by the performance, even crying. From that experience I learned that sometimes those headaches are worth it, and they pay off in the end.”
When chatting with Rachel it was obvious that she had enjoyed her time with SOAW. The most rewarding part for her was seeing it all come together in the end, after all of the scheduling, troubleshooting, emails and phone calls that had gone into making it happen. Through this experience, Rachel now knows that she enjoys doing the nitty gritty and taking care of the details that allow experiences like this to happen.
After graduating from the MPACS program, Rachel hopes to find a job with a non-profit or grassroots organization in Canada. After having had a successful internship, Rachel says she would recommend the internship experience to any MPACS student, and advises other students to work hard to engage with the experience and ask questions of those you’re working with to learn as much as you can. And don’t be daunted by the potential cost- Rachel’s internship was made possible with substantial funding from the PACS department at Grebel and the uWaterloo David Johnston International Experience Award.
To find out more about MPACS internships, visit our MPACS internship webpage or talk to Eric Lepp, Internship Coordinator.