This past Saturday was my last day at Centro Presente. These nine weeks went by so fast, I remember my first day like it was yesterday!!!!. As an intern in the Legal department, some of my responsibilities were to organize events to inform the immigrant community about the current issues that affect the community as well as to organize educational training on basic rights for undocumented immigrants. As time passed, I helped with administrative responsibilities such as doing translations of documents and assisting people when they came in into the office to receive assistance. With these responsibilities, I have the opportunity to gain knowledge in Latino immigrant community as well as how to organize events which I did not have any experience before. I learned that it takes a lot of time to prepare an event but it feels great when I see the outcomes at the end.
During my time at Centro, I also joined some of the protests that the Worker Rights Organizer from Centro Present, who along with allies of Centro organized pickets outside of restaurants that belong to employers who did not pay their workers what they worked for. I am very happy that Centro is helping these workers to get the money that they have earned with their hard work. I am very sad to know that these kinds of things happen in a country like United States where there are so many laws that protect workers. I think it may be because employers take advantages of employees that they may think that do not know their rights, thank god for organization like Centro that are paying attention to these cases and are doing their best to help workers against exploitation
As I finished my internship, I want to learn more about the issues that many immigrants are facing in the United States. I feel that my summer experience was only a glimpse of what the issues that many immigrants are facing in this country. I would like to gain more knowledge and be able to help more those whom I am able to help.
For students interest in an internship with my host organization, I advice them to get ready to learn a lot about the different issues that immigrants face in the United States. Be ready to meet different people as the Latino community is composed of many different people which make the experience even more worth experiencing.
As I return to Brandeis, I plan to join the Brandeis Immigrant Education Initiative, a recently created student-organized to create awareness on Brandeis campus about current immigration issues. I want to share my summer experience with my fellow-Brandeis people and give my ideas so that we can create more awareness and help the immigrant communities to fight for their rights. During this internship, I realized that there are a lot of injustices in this world and a lot has to be done to live in a more just place. I learned about the issues in many different perspective which made me realized that we need to work to get social justice.
– Ivonne Moreno ’13