by Angela Nassar
It has been a few days since the end of my internship. I wanted to take this time to mark this important moment and reflect on the past twelve weeks.
As I was going into this internship, I thought that everything I would be asked to do would directly implicate contact with human rights work. Certainly, most of the tasks given to me were connected in some way to human rights—some more than others. Nevertheless, I discovered that at times, in this field especially, it was normal to do other type of work and to delve into other skills that I may have or that I needed to develop further.
Initially, a great desire to learn more about human rights and experience first-hand how the work was done in this domain pushed me to participate in the IHRIP. Now, after having completed my twelve weeks, I feel like I really have accomplished that purpose and more importantly, much more than that.
In fact, I was able to see that sometimes human rights work entails not so human rights related work but rather, really delves deep into each one’s personal skills to use them to the benefit of one end goal which is for the bettering of human rights. All skills and knowledge are welcome and much coveted. I always felt like all the aspects of my personality were in motion during my time as an intern—from my legal, to research, to social and creative skills. What was truly very fulfilling is that everything within me was being systematically activated. This enabled me to discover that human rights work is special because of these holistic and all-encompassing characteristics. I found this aspect unique to this type of work and very enriching, as it constantly entails interdisciplinary engagement and is not restricted to a set in stone list of skills.
In brief, as an intern with the IDEHPUCP, there were moments where I found myself going beyond my initial preconceptions and finding that there lies a limitless world behind human rights work. Now, I see this journey as a great learning experience. Indeed, it surpassed my expectations and enabled me to see once again that things are not always as you conceive them to be at the start. In this case, they were much more!