Labor Of Love

When we arrived in the Dublin airport, the group of nine of us were run down, but still smiling. After collecting our bags, we emerged into the city for the first time to see a “Champlain” and a smile in return. He packed us all into taxi cabs and shipped us to our apartments. When we finally arrived at our homes for the following four months, we met the lovely Claire Gannon. She took us to her apartment and explained things like how to get hot water and how to use the washing machine. Trust me, it’s not as easy as it seems. Not only are we spoiled with hot water back in America, but we were too jetlagged to figure out the timer! Stephen and Claire are only 2/3 of our right hand man/woman team. Lilly Johnsson, the Operations Manager, is the wonderful woman we get to see first thing when we walk into the academic center every morning, who is sending us to plays and on horseback riding adventures, who fills the stapler. She can do it all.
These three are only a few of the people who are telling us we can do it all.



Lilly, Stephen, and Claire

Stephen asked us what we had noticed about the city during our orientation. Seeing how we had slept most of the daytime we had in Dublin, we had spent our first few nights adventuring into restaurants, pubs, and dance clubs. Right?
I raised my hand and told him of my observation.
“Well, we went to a pub and I’m pretty sure we were the only females there.”
Its things like this that are explained in my courses here in Dublin. It is possibly the most glorious thing about studying Abroad with Champlain College. They didn’t send me to Dublin to learn about U.S. history for the fifteenth time in my life—they sent me here to get to know the country’s history.
I am taking two COR classes while studying abroad. They’re beyond interesting. Not only is the course material new and fascinating, but so are my professors. In Modern Irish Social History, our professor Anthony M. O’Halloran explained to us that women weren’t part of the social scene until the past thirty years. We will continue to learn about how Ireland has changed in the modern era as well as what it means to be Irish.
As a writer, the easiest way to engulf myself in the knowledge of a new culture is to read. And, I don’t mean text books. I mean literature, poetry, anything that gives my eyes the vision of a culture. To be honest, Champlain deserves a high five for providing me with a course that does exactly this. For Caroline Elbay’s, Cultural Immersion through Irish Literature, I have already begun to read into the past of this old country. We have started the course discussing what it means to be Irish, the Anglo-Irish literature class, and reading Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Not only am I reading with Caroline, but I am writing, too. In her course, Writing the City, I am immersing myself in the culture Dublin’s streets are filled with. We are sent out into the city to review our experiences at coffee shops, restaurants, theatres, and even places like firehouses and charitable organisations. It is natural to me to write everyday that I live. I write about the things that I do to fill the hours of everyday adventure. However, I haven’t necessarily reviewed my experiences at the places I get coffee or see a play. I see this as a fantastic way to recall my time in the city as well as broaden my skills as a writer.
It’s always nice when a professor recognizes my writing; when someone says, “I read a bit of your creative work, and I enjoyed it.” On our first day of Jacinta Kendrick’s Cultural Immersion through the Fine Arts course, we took a stroll to The National Museum to study Bog Bodies, bodies preserved after years of sitting in Ireland’s bogs, Or—an exhibit dedicated to Ireland’s Gold, and The Treasury, a collection of secular and religious Irish artefacts. I stood in front of the Tully Lough Cross, sketching its intricate design and embedded amber stones when Jacinta approached me to check in on my progress. As she was still getting familiar with our names, she recognized mine and commented on my writing, encouraging me to incorporate it into our course. Ironically, I had spent the previous ten minutes pumping out an exhibit inspired poem.
I forgot how it felt to be refreshed in terms of my education. To have professors who know about things I’ve never learned about before is fascinating. Not to mention trying to grasp the accent! My professors have also encouraged us to go to their favourite places in Ireland which include places in the city as well as along the coast and into the country side. However, the best thing about having professors who are familiar with Ireland is that we get to tell them all about our homes. About maple syrup, life on the farm, the culture differences between the variety of states we all come from, and most of all, the weather! You should see some of the reactions we get when we discuss the 30-some inches of snow we received as a New Year’s gift!
We have received nothing but comfort from the rapidly growing family we have in Ireland. If anything, it’s nice to hear that our staff and faculty really want to help us get to know this city—to hear them say we can do it all.
Anthony M. O’Halloran told us the first day of class that he doesn’t have to be here; he wants to be here, because teaching is his “labor of love.”