We are at the end of our second week, and this trip is flying by! This week started to become more eventful in our activities surrounding social work and it has been a very informative experience. This week, we did three visits: Foundation House, a Research Colloquium at Melbourne University, and Anglicare.
Foundation House was the first visit of the week and, for us, had the biggest impact. Foundation House is an organization that provides help to people of refugee backgrounds, whether it be they are trying to adjust to life in a new country, dealing with trauma, etc. While visiting this agency, we watched a video of a family in Syria and how they lived during a period of wartime. It was hard not to feel shocked and almost disturbed by the conditions they were living in, especially when you saw a 7-year-old girl being able to tell the difference between a missile and a tank projectile just by the sound. Afterwards, we read a case study and identified the effects change and trauma can have on children, and steps we can take as professionals in the childcare field to get those kids the services they may need. We felt very awakened by this visit since there is a high population of refugees in America, including Ohio. Learning how to help refugees cope with massive change and maintain a sense of cultural identity is definitely something to bring back the US with us and apply to our jobs in order to help the situation with refugees and immigrants in our country, especially since we are both interested in working with minority populations.
During our second week, we also got the opportunity to travel on the Great Ocean Road! We took two days to travel by bus, and we saw so many breathtaking places. We got to see the beautiful rolling hills of the Australian countryside, a huge change from the modern city life of Melbourne! Here, we saw some of Australia’s natural foliage and wild life, like gum trees, wallabies, koalas, kookaburras, and kangaroos! It was very cool seeing these animals in their natural habitat since we can only see them in zoos in America! We also, of course, saw many beautiful places on the ocean. When you stand on the top of a massive cliff and look out over Australia’s bright blue water, or in a canyon that used to be hundreds of feet underwater, it hard to grasp that what you’re looking at is even real. When we saw London Bridge and the Twelve Apostles, we closed our eyes, as prompted by our tour guide Katy, and imagined the water creating something so beautiful and tried to take it all in. This was our favorite excursion we’ve taken on this trip because we saw some of what we pictured Australia would be like before we came, but we also saw things we never could have imagined, and that is something we will keep with us forever.
-Jordan Mathias and Carynne Hawkins