Processing In Poland

Greetings to you on a cool, clear night in Oświęcim! 

More often than not, students at any given college will speak about "the course that didn't really matter", and say that "they're not learning anything". I would venture to say that a good number of college students are not processing or thinking about coursework past the classroom. The classroom, in my experience, is where the seeds of an idea or learning are planted. The world is where these take shape and grow for me. What could a week long study of the Shoah (Holocaust) at different sites in Poland mean once processing them?

This experience is unlike any other. Alice Lok Cahana, an artist and survivor of Auschwitz says “The ground is different there”. When you travel through ground that has been tainted by racist, perverted ideology such as that of the Nazi party, where an inconceivable number of people suffered and died… it is a lot to carry. While I will not go into great detail about what I have become a witness to

through this study, I would like to speak about processing it.

What do you do to process what you hear, see, and feel? For our group, this means sitting together for sharing of feelings and insights from our many shared and individual experiences. It also means writing through blog postings and some papers when we return home. Processing is a key component of any powerful experience. Without it, part of the experience is actually lost.

Processing means with thinking and feeling in a deeper way about what you have heard, what you have seen, and what you have felt. This can be done through writing, silent meditation, conversation, drawing, or any number of creative forms. When you process, you take your experience to another level. You do not relive it, but you reinterpret it. One experience can mean a multiplicity of things. At face value it could have meant one thing. With processing, an opportunity for something else to emerge is given to us.

Developing one's own thought on any given topic is part of the academic process. The entire idea of it is as one wise woman has always told me "developing a question and exploring it". Part of my process this week has been taking photographs and selecting the ones I feel are most powerful. Upon return to the US, I plan on reflecting on each photo by captioning it.

Whether it is a 101 or a study abroad to Poland, the experience needs processing. Finding out what helps you process can be a challenge in itself. Trying more than one type can help you find the place where you best process.

-Luis Ramos