Voices

Today I would like to show you a beautiful video. It is a video I made with my ESL students here in NY. My students are Spanish-speaking adults. Most of them have extremely limited English (although they are getting better by the day). We made a video of them talking about their dreams. It is beautiful. The dreams that they have are the same dreams we all have.

But I can't put it up here. Many of my students do not have documents. And so I cannot show you this video today. But here are some examples of what they said...

I have a dream that...
One day I will speak English.
I will see my children grow up with good hearts.
One day my family will be all together forever.
One day everyone in the world will know God.
Some day I will have a good job.
The world will finish violence.
One day I will return to my country and help people.
I will have documents.

You see what I mean? People are people. And we all have dreams.

We can have many different positions on immigration reform, but what we cannot lose sight of is the fact that we are all brothers and sisters.

So I am sorry to have to cut the video and silence my students' voices.

But I have good news as well.

This week we are introducing tweets live from Congo. We are receiving tweets directly from our craftspeople in Congo and publishing them on twitter in Swahili with translation.

The topics our craftspeople will be tweeting on will be limited. They can't comment on the ongoing conflict in Congo, but they can tell you a bit about their own lives. The tweets will provide at least a glimpse of their lives, their words, and their voices. They will tweet about what is going on from week to week, and some of the joys and struggles in their own lives.

Too often I take my own voice, and my own freedoms, for granted. But many people, throughout this world, live in situations in which their voices are often either silenced or unheard. So check out our website, where we are posting our twitter updates, or join us on twitter, in one small attempt to bring a few more voices into the global community? And remember you can sign our guest book, and send messages directly to our craftspeople! Both your voice, and their voices, do matter!