Extension Project 2 Ashley

I decided to conduct my sponsorship interview on Laura Moores, my roommate. Her sponsor turned out to not be a person, but rather an event and an assignment about the event that challenged her mentally and emotionally. What ended up happening was there was a shooting at the mall closest to her school, and one of her classmates was shot and ended up dying. She described it as “It was one of those “you remember exactly where you were, what you were doing, and what time it was moments.'” She was struggling after the event and it wasn’t until her teacher assigned a “What is” project that she started to face what happened and let her emotions out through her writing. She wrote about “what is catastrophe” and talked about the event. She hadn’t talked about it much until then, and didn’t know how to, so this assignment kinda forced her to face the reality and cope with it. She described to me what it was like to physically write the paper and said, “It was so emotionally draining to write about what happened and how it made me feel and how it affected me.” She had to relive that time in her life and found that she was more deeply affected by it than she previously thought. Even though it proved hard, she said, “This came to be a sort of a creative outlet or door for me. I was suddenly able to read, write and talk about what had happened, to my teachers, my friends, and even my mother, I had been especially reserved towards her about it all.” She used writing as her outlet for expressing her emotions and I applaud her for that, because that something I could never achieve personally. She took a hard event that Impacted her for the rest of her life and made something therapeutic of it which many other people in the same position wouldn’t have the power to do. The last quote I’m going to share is, “In a very roundabout, but real way, my literacy was challenged- and improved.” She mentioned that this was one of the most challenging writing assignments for her, but she pushed through it with tears and pain and made it a stepping stone in her literary progress in life. I found this interview very insightful because she went outside the box in looking for a sponsor and found an event that could do more than any human could.