Refugees in Greece; Farming in Ecuador; and Global Skateboarding: Adventure Learning Grant 2016-17
Location
Fairhaven Auditorium
(FA 300)
Alia Taqieddin is in her final quarter at WWU. She is a student of Community Health, and is currently completing an interdisciplinary concentration at Fairhaven College. This quarter, she is student-teaching a Fairhaven course entitled “The Syrian Refugee Crisis.”
Alia was awarded the Adventure Learning Grant for the 2016-2017 school year to explore community health and resistance to occupation in the West Bank of Palestine. After having to change her plans unexpectedly, she lived and worked in central Athens alongside an international community during what has come to be known as the European Refugee Crisis. Despite being in a geographically different location than her original proposal, Alia found that resistance, home, and memory still emerged as central themes throughout her months in Greece.
Zi Zhang’s interdisciplinary concentration is called “Urban Sustainability” and focuses on Urban Planning, Design, and Global Issues. He engaged in participant observation of skateboard cultures in Cape Town, South Africa, Guangzhou, China, and Seoul, South Korea.
Somehow making her way out here from the flattest, driest part of the Midwest, Grace Coffey is a Fairhaven and Huxley student studying agriculture and Urban Planning (but not urban agriculture). She has devoted much of her life in Bellingham battling blackberries in the Outback, and has journeyed through some corners of the world volunteering on farms. Her other very varied interests include bread baking, ceramics, blues dancing, housing issues, Harry Potter, trees, and climate justice.
Description of ALG project
Over the course of a year Grace traveled down through the Andes Mountains. In Medellin Colombia, she experienced the city’s innovative urban planning while volunteering in informal settlements. She lived in a rural isolated community on the border of Ecuador and Colombia for 3 months, teaching English and learning about rural economies and agriculture. In Chile she experienced urban planning and life in Valparaiso, then lived and worked on a small dairy farm. Finally, in the high, high mountains of Peru she was welcomed into indigenous Quechua farming life.