My Experience With My Internship At CENIFE

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REFLECTING ON MY EXPERIENCES WITH MY INTERNSHIP AT CENIFE AND MY ENCOUNTER WITH ETHNOGRAPHY AND MY EXPERIENCE WITH EXPLORING THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

My internship with CENIFE was definitely a life changing experience. My primary task in the organization was to assist this organization with specific tasks, such as working one-on-one with the students that attend school at CENIFE, and doing some information gathering work to gain information on the CENIFE students’ families so this organization can better care for each of the student’s/kid’s family units and cater to each student’s specific academic needs. I went to this Dominican program with a contingent of students from Rutgers University, who were all participating in the course ‘Research …show more content…

Working as an intern at CENIFE, and going there almost everyday travelling up the hill on the dirt road, really opened my eyes to the life of most Dominicans.
My first day in the Dominican Republic, which was on Sunday June 7, 2015, started off very rocky. I arrived in the Las Américas International Airport at 6:30 pm in the early evening. Getting off the plane and leaving the airport, I was overwhelmed by the realization that I had travelled alone to a country where a majority of the people would not speak English. I met up with the driver who was sent by Dr. Decena, and he drove me to the hostel in Santo Domingo that I was staying at, which took less than an hour to get to. The drive to my hostel was really bumpy, as the roads in Santo Domingo are really rough and motorists don’t observe traffic rules. The official first day of my internship at CENIFE, which was on Monday, June 8, 2015, I basically just got acquainted with where I was to work and the staff I was going to work with and the students that I was to help. The place of my internship was …show more content…

Decena for about three hours, where I learned an array of information. We discussed and were lectured on various topics, such as ethnography, the research interview, racialization, and some Dominican history and culture. Moreover, Saturdays and Sundays were more or less free days, with some program excursions occurring on Saturday. On my first Friday in the Dominican Republic with this program, which was on June 12, 2015, I explored the city of Santo Domingo with the other Rutgers students in this program, and Fatima was our guide, and we explored the historic part of Santo Domingo, particularly ‘Zona Colonial,’ which has a large amount of museums and landmarks. Furthermore, some of these sites and landmarks that we also explored and/or discussed include Puerta de la Misericordia, Parque Duarte and we saw the convent of the Dominicans across the way, and then we went to the Catedral de Santo Domingo. One important issue that I learned clearly, and this was mainly because it was an answer to a question I asked and because the answer was given in English; is that the charming historic construction of structures around and within Santo Domingo is now the exception rather than the rule. Santo Domingo’s skyline is now dominated in the outer parts of the town by a neat and uninspired sprawl of residential towers, most of which, I am sure, the

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