Name: Margaret MacGillivray
Social Justice Group: Refugees
Date of Fieldwork: February 2, 2018
Name of Organization: UNICEF
Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Aaron Greenburg
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did:
We interviewed Aaron Greenburg about what he does at UNICEF
What I learned:
Aaron has been working at UNICEF for 10 years, meaning he knows a lot about refugees. While during some of the other interviews, we were told similar facts and statistics, he gave us new statistics we never knew about. During his work at UNICEF, 20% of his time goes to the issue of refugees. He taught us a lot about what he does to help. In 2015, there were 2 million people who took roots to Europe. Many of these people were coming from places in the Middle East. At first, Europe opened up all of their doors to migrants, welcoming them with open hearts. Eventually, many countries in Europe stopped letting in refugees. It was left to all of the border countries such as Italy and Greece to take in all of the refugees, even though Greece is currently going bankrupt. Aaron works to settle these issues, and ensure that more countries are letting in refugees. Aaron also taught us about his other area of work which is children who are detained. A lot of the time, governments don’t know what to do with these children, so they get detention. He goes around asking countries to build orphanages so that these children can have a place to go.
Governments don’t know what to do with them, so they go to detention. Overall, Aaron had a lot of amazing information and experience in our topic. He had lived in refugee camps, and been in war zones. He knows what refugees go through, and know it’s a topic that must be changed.
What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:
Throughout this fieldwork, I learned that no matter how much you study a topic, there will always be aspects of it that you won’t know. I didn’t know anything about the struggles that children refugees face, and after learning it, it opened up a completely different topic. I will never know all there is to know about refugees, but I can do everything I can to make my voice heard on this crucial issue.
