Lens of Culture Project

Lens of Culture Description

The project Lens of Culture was a very interesiting one. Even the name of the project. My teachers named it lens of culture because in the actual pilgrimage for humanities we were supposed to see the communities we were walking through in different perspectives, on the other hand for physics we made pinhole cameras and we made lens to take a picture. The name incorperated both the humanities and physics project and combined them. There were 18 different groups with 3-5 people researching the communities and the routes we were going to take. Our first plan was to walk The Camino De Santiago but it didn't really worked out as planned so we refined the project and decided to walk through San Diego and see different types of cultures in different places of San Diego. This project was a lot of the students job. If we didn't get something completed it would screw the walk up . It was a lot of work but we accomplished and it was a great experience.

My Pilgrimage

This pilgrimage was a very great experience. The purpose of this pilgrimage to me was to notice your surroundings and see the culture we live in. We went to a lot of interesting places some that I have been to and a lot of places that I haven’t really known of. I was excited to see how this pilgrimage would end up and how we were gonna accomplish it together as a whole team. Our project is Lens of Culture and the way this pilgrimage fits into our project is because the meaning of lens is to see through something differently and going on this walk made me specifically look at where we live differently and actually know/see the culture around where I am.

There was a moment where I felt extremely annoyed. The first night at the world beat center there was classes when we first got there, it was a drumming and zumba class. It was very loud that first night and we had to stay in one specific place which was hard because I wanted to be with friends and talk but we couldn’t talk because we would be disturbing the class. Although that wasn’t the hard part the hard part was that when I began to get tired and wanted to go to bed I couldn’t because the loud sound of the drums kept me up. When it was finally over everyone was relieved and everyone went sound asleep.

Blisters was a hard part of the walk also. I can recall Ms. Pl bringing up the topic blisters a lot when preparing for this long hard walk but I never really payed attention to that because I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal or simply I just couldn't get them. On the second day of the walk I began to feel a little bit of a disturbance on my feet but I didn’t speak up or say anything about it and on the last day of the walk I just couldn’t take it anymore and I had to stop with my friend Hannah to get patched up and ended up with 2 blisters on my feet. After I got my band aids on I felt better and was ready to catch up with my classmates and start walking again.

Finally the very last moment which to me was the most important is ending up at the top of the long and steep hill we had to walk. The reason for this was because after this hill we all knew we accomplished and finished this extremely long and tiring 3 day walk. Some people ran it and others walked it. I could feel drops of sweat rolling down my face when I was half up that hill and the sun beating on me like it was taunting me and yelling at me to quit. I didn’t quit though because I knew how good I would feel after I finished this. Finally I was on top of that hill looking down at what I just accomplished feeling the cold breeze hit my face from the ocean a few miles away feeling great.

Knowing I was having a rough time in the beginning and wanting to quit just on the first day and ending up finishing the whole walk with a tired but happy smile on my face felt great because I knew that I was being resilient throughout the whole walk especially that last day of the pilgrimage walk. I think that pilgrimage walk will make a difference in our team if we let it make a change because I honestly think that everyone wants to know and talk to each other and be a united team we just have to reach out to one another and be mindful of others as well as yourself. I think I would do some things a little differently but overall it was an amazing experience and I would do it again. (:

This was the research paper I wrote. On the pilgrimage 3 of my classmates and I were in charge of covering Hillcrest as our topic. We had to find their culture, their style, the type of food they ate, and different types of personality. After researching Hillcrest and walking through it on our 35 mile walk I learned many new things about it that I would have never learned. I also transformed just a plain wooden pole into a colorful representation of Hillcrest. I came up with the idea of having the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple kinda of like the flag put right in the center of Hillcrest reprsnting the type of sexualtiy that lives there and how they are open about what they feel. I'm very proud of the work my team members and I did on this project. It was a really great experience to walk 35 miles in 3 days from Chicano Park all the way to La Jolla UCSD. I'm sure no other 9 grader can say that that are not part of team journey.