Andrea Carboni Jiménez – Blog 2: 30/09/22
When I applied to the McGill Human Rights Internship, I hoped to travel somewhere far, experience a different culture, and work in a large team. My internship at the Clinic, however, was remote and accompanied by various challenges: Zoom links that didn’t work, difficulties accessing online platforms, and feelings of isolation. While this was not what I envisioned, what I learned went far beyond what I could’ve expected.
A large portion of this internship involved following an upper-year law course on disability law. Every class was accompanied by fruitful conversations about students’ preconceptions and beliefs about disability, the ethics of working in disability and human rights, and honest conversations about the work they want to do moving forward and the principles learned from the course that can be applied in different fields.
While I was far away from the students and professors, these conversations and the work I was assigned pushed me to not only gain more knowledge about Peruvian perspectives on disability, but different Latin American perspectives more generally. I learned more about my own Latin American country of origin than I ever pushed myself to within this legal context. This experience sparked a desire in me to speak with family members, friends, and peers about their conceptions of disability and the implications of such, bringing me closer to them. I have come to appreciate that the physical distance with the internship ended up fostering feelings of closeness with those around me.