My name is Christian Gachet; I am 22 years old, I got my transfer degree at Walla Walla Community College, and this is my third year in sociology at Whitman College. My hometown is Quito, the capital of Ecuador. Most of my work with the immigration rights coalition art committee on the Walla Walla Coronavirus stories project involves interviewing the Walla Walla community about their experiences with COVID-19. The interviews last from 20 to 50 minutes, are carried out virtually through the Zoom platform and consist of personalized questions to the interviewees. We archive the interviews, transcribe them, in some cases, translate them into Spanish, and upload them to the Northwest Historical Archives website. The project’s objective is to collect the experiences of people with the COVID-19 pandemic with special emphasis on the Latino community.
As the project progresses, you can visualize realities that otherwise remain hidden. I am learning more about the Latino community that resides in Walla Walla. I also learn more about my own experience with COVID-19. I had the opportunity to interview Luis Rosales, executive director of Trilogy, and I found that conversation particularly valuable because, in it, I could see that his experience was similar to mine. As Luis told me about his experience with his family, mental health, difficulties, and hopes for the future, I suddenly noticed several similarities with my own experience with the pandemic. Just as there is more to this interview in the Northwest archive, these positive responses guided our team to take the project in a more lasting direction.
The listener´s project emerged as an extension of Walla Walla Coronavirus stories, but with a different approach. The Listeners project seeks to train a series of volunteers to establish a list of interviewers available at all times in the Walla Walla Public Library. The goal is to make the Walla Walla community feel unconditionally open at all times for anyone who wants to share something valuable to the community. Although the project is still in development, it is exciting to see how the volunteers’ creativity can break with the classic dynamics between interviewer and interviewee, subverting expectations to build something genuinely new. All of us who work at the Walla Walla Coronavirus stories project and The Listeners project hope that these efforts to build the Walla Walla story actively will have the ability to impact the community positively.
Experiences like Christian’s are made possible by the Whitman Internship Grant, which provides funding for students to participate in unpaid internships at both for-profit and non-profit organizations. We are happy to be sharing blog posts from students who were supported by either a summer, fall, spring, or year-long Whitman Internship Grant at organizations, businesses, and research labs all around the world. To learn how you could secure a Whitman Internship Grant or host a Whitman intern at your organization, click here or contact Assistant Director for Internship Programs Mitzy Rodriguez