Can you be a mom and study at the same time an international academic program like EMTM? Is it even possible to keep following your academic and career goals when being a single mom? Yes, you can! Statia, our amazing EMTM mom from Trinidad and Tobago, gives her account of what it takes to grasp the opportunity and be a role model for her son. She opens up her heart and tells us her story about the fight against her self, and against the social stigmas in her society, about how her son motivated her and EMTM classmates supported her. It was a loop of faith, but Statia would do it over, every time again! There isn’t a more fitting name for my EMTM blog contribution than “Out of the mouth of babes”. “Babe”? You may ask. Yes babe! There is a passage in my bible that says “ Out of the mouth of babes, the Lord ordains strength”. His name is Caelen, my 4 year old son who initiated, rather, motivated my application for this amazing journey (EMTMlife). In one of our “adult” conversations he asked in a very calculated manner and adult tone; mummy, when are you going back to school? The deadline was quickly approaching, and I battled tremendously with the decision to submit my application. I mean, what kind of mother leaves her four years old son to journey half way around the world to study? Who will take care of him while I’m away? Is it financially and academically feasible to travel from country to country every four months with him? Can’t I study tourism in Trinidad and Tobago? Or even the Caribbean? Off course I could have. Conventional wisdom dictated that I should have. But! If I don’t apply, how do I fulfill my academic and career goals? And fulfill my parental obligation to my son, the love of my life? EMTM afforded me the ‘best’ opportunity to achieve, not only my goals, but my most pertinent parental obligation i.e. to teach Caelen by example how I strived, persevered, believed regardless of critics, obstacles, failures, despite every bone and fiber in my body saying, “Statia it’s okay to settle”. Believe me, the obstacles were great, the road tumultuous, but at the end of the tremendous battle occurring in my mind I could not ‘settle’ into the conventional single parent cycle of dependence and blame. That would benefit neither me nor my son.
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Did you know that there are people who have lived for 40 years in refugee camps in the North of Africa? Well, that is not abnormal. We did not either... The people we are talking about are the Sahrawi people of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. They are a mix of Bedouins, Berbers and black Africans who have always lived in a region called Western Sahara. Take a look at the map, and you will notice it right below Morocco, but separated by a striped line, which should make you think right now 'what is that'? A group of students from generation 2014-16 will head in January to the refugee camps of the Sahrawi people, located in the South of Algeria, where they will look at the possibilities to create a tourism product. |
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