With a maymay user’s baby in Mandalay.

Leadership

My view of the world has undoubtedly been changed as a result of the Global Social Benefit Fellowship. I never had a distinct ‘aha’ moment, but looking back, my view of what it means to be a leader and how I can effectively do my part for the bettering of our planet is all clearer thanks to my fellowship experience. I feel as though a light has been shed on aspects of myself, my strengths, and how I problem solve throughout all parts of the fellowship. When I was in Myanmar, I needed to problem solve and make things happen for myself. We were sitting in the office in the first week we were there, sort of waiting to get directions and be told what to do. We spent so much time preparing for this, to be in Myanmar and with everyone at Koe Koe Tech, that once we got there it was sort of a stand still. What next? Everything was laid out so clearly before. We came from the classroom, a place of such structure, right into a real professional setting, where we were given the power to do what we thought was right to help Koe Koe Tech. We wouldn’t have any interviews, any interaction with people, any progress made, unless we got up and did it ourselves. Nobody was going to tell us exactly how to do it. We were expected to figure that out on our own. Things began to happen when we made them happen. We had to get up and do it. We were productive and worked well together and separately. I was impressed by how much we were able to get done once we were in the field. Through this, I learned something invaluable about leadership. A leader doesn’t sit and wait for instructions. A leader is not told what to do every step of the way. A leader takes their strengths and goes ahead and just does what needs to get done. A good leader is one who does this in an honorable and respectful way. As the only person on my interdisciplinary team with filmmaking skills, whenever we were conducting a filmed interview, I was the leader. I needed to delegate tasks, ask for help, teach my teammates certain skills, and be patient and respectful as through it all. In this way, the fellowship showed me, in a very real hands-on way, how to be a successful and respectable leader.

The Human Connection

When you look at Myanmar at first glance it is different than the United States in almost every way it can be. It is a country with an incredibly rich culture that dates back centuries. It is a developing nation with a dissimilar government to ours, a feeble health-care system, a dominating national religion, a lack of sanitation, and a recent history of military rule. It is a nation stricken by a great deal of poverty. What these facts don’t say however is how similar an individual in Myanmar is to an individual from the United States. We are alike in that we both have the ability to love and feel pain, we both have families and want to be successful. We want to be accepted into our cultures. We are humans. The human experience is what connects us all. This is something I always knew, but reading about people all over the world is much different than sitting down face to face with them. I remember sitting atop a temple in Bagan with a young woman around the same age as me. She saw my friend, Athena, and I walking around a different temple and offered to show us a spot that she loves and that is special to her. We climbed up to the top of a temple and found ourselves high up, looking out over thousands of stupas in the countryside.

Bagan.

We sat with her for a while and shared information about ourselves. She was just a normal, young 20 year old girl with a boyfriend and a family and a good sense of humor. We talked and laughed and became fast friends. She is no different from me. She may live a completely different life in a place incredibly foreign to me, but at the end of the day, we are the same. It was through experiences like this that I found how much I love social entrepreneurship as an effective way to help solve the greatest problems of the world. The goals of social entrepreneurship don’t come from a place of seeing people who need ‘saving’ or charity cases, but as real human beings like us that we can work alongside to empower and help unlock their potential to be great. Social entrepreneurship is a sustainable solution that strives to work with others to build something that will last; to make systematic changes for the better of others, to, as the Miller Center succinctly states, “end global poverty and protect the planet.”

Bagan.

Beliefs

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe there is a meaning or a purpose to life, so I don’t look for one as many do. The fellowship did not change any of this about me. What the fellowship did teach me to believe, however, is the importance of self-reflection. I have found myself looking inside myself more since my experience with the Miller Center. I actively try and make sense of my emotions, my feelings, and why I do what I do. I have a greater sense of self-awareness because of this fellowship. I am better able to understand my own self and that has helped me greatly in trying to understand others. I feel as though through this experience I have learned what I like and what is important to me. This has helped me figure out what path I want to take going forward. I thrive in settings that are unknown, I love assimilating to a new culture, immersing myself, being the different one in the crowd. I love working with people on a team and I love using my creativity to help others. I love telling stories. Through self-reflection I have learned all these things. I know what makes me happy, what my strengths are, where I excel. I have learned that I will never stop learning. That is one of the beautiful things about life, that I will always be learning more about myself, the world, and my place in it.

Looking Forward

One vocational decision I have made looking forward is that I am not ready to start a career. I have more growing to do, more of the world to see, before I settle down. Now, with absolutely nothing holding me back, is the best time for me to do this. And so I will.

Inle Lake.

Filming out the window of the Yangon Circle Train. Riding the train allowed me a 3 hour glimpse into the lives of local Myanmar people.

As I look back on my experience with the Miller Center I realize how much I have changed as a person. Or maybe not changed, but a part of me that has always been here is now at the surface. I find myself thinking a lot about what I did this Summer and how it changed my life. I was able to combine my passions for filmmaking with social justice and take charge on the project. This experience taught me three very important things: I am incredibly independent. I want to work in a career that makes a difference in some way. I love meeting new people and living in different cultures. In a weird way, I found myself more comfortable in Myanmar around the people there than I do in the United States. Something about nobody knowing me or my culture or my background was incredibly refreshing. Many people thought I was outside of my comfort zone this summer, however I was right in the thick of my comfort zone. This is what I enjoy, this is where I thrive. I love being a different person in a different place..

Filming in a blacksmith shop on Inle Lake. This woman was very interested in my camera and asked many questions.

One moment where I felt incredibly secure during my time in Myanmar was when I was running my second video interview with my team. For the first video interview, I was nervous and we hadn’t gotten the hang of things yet. At the second however I felt confident in my abilities to delegate tasks and run the interview. After it was done I was confident with what I had accomplished. My footage looked good and I worked hard to get answers from the woman that would go well in a video. I felt the most confident I ever had and was simultaneously enjoying myself more than ever. It was an exhilarating combination- one that I realized could be my reality in the future. It is such a good feeling to find yourself doing what you truly love.

I love spending time with people. I am extroverted and genuinely enjoy listening to what others have to say so I can have a better understanding of their human experiences. Sharing time is something that has always been important to me. I come from a loving family that values time together over everything else. My incredibly patient parents taught us how to listen, be respectful, and be genuine. I recognized from a young age how human others were. I tried to never be absorbed in my own world but to recognize everyone else around me as people with families and lives and thoughts, all just as important as mine. My experience in Myanmar this summer solidified that mentality and showed me how important it will be to carry that forward.

This beautiful family in Mandalay was so welcoming and kind. They reminded me that human connection is most important in life.

After I graduate I plan to travel somewhere different so that I can work a job for a year outside of the United States, and then I will apply for a Fulbright scholarship the year after that. I hope to gain professional experience abroad for a year before I submit my application so that I am prepared for a year long Fulbright placement if I am successful in the application process. Regardless of my plan, I hope to continue surprising myself with what I love and live in different parts of the world.

Here I am showing two women of the Kayan Tribe footage I took of them weaving || Inle Lake, Shan State.

As we are wrapping up our last few weeks in Myanmar, I have begun reflecting on the experiences I have had in this beautiful country. I knew my work as a Global Social Benefit Fellow would be challenging in many ways, however I launched myself into the experience with no expectations, just that I would be experiencing something new and unique. I have gained even more from this experience than I anticipated. I have traveled to the developing world before to complete service work, but have never worked in a professional setting abroad. Working at Koe Koe Tech has been an immersive experience in itself; most employees were born and raised in Myanmar and many speak little or no English. I have picked up small words and phrases in Burmese to interact with them and others. I have made some great friends here that I know I will have for a while.

My wonderful teammate and friend, Athena Nguyen, holding an umbrella to protect my camera from the rain. || Ayeyarwaddy Division

The Process 

My work specifically on this project at Koe Koe Tech is with videography and marketing. I have studied film in school for the past three years at Santa Clara University. SCU film classes have students work in groups of three or four. Each student has a specific role they are required to carry out over the course of the project. There is usually a producer, director, cinematographer, and editor. In the case of my work at the fellowship, I have worked every role. We have conducted six in person interviews with women who use Koe Koe Tech’s maymay application. I sat with a translator and called users to find the right women to interview, dealt with many cancellations, and many schedule changes. In this way, my work was similar to that of a producer. I then drafted interview questions based on the women we were going to interview, set up a translator to come with me from Koe Koe Tech, and went out into the field to interview the women and film with my camera equipment. At the interviews themselves, I acted as cinematographer and director- I would light the interview area, set up my camera with the appropriate settings, and film b roll footage of the family after the interview. Before each interview my teammates helped me find gifts to bring to the women and their families to thank them for their time. After the interviews, I went through the footage and logged every clip by renaming them on my hard drive and then writing notes about their content and quality on google documents organized by date. In this way, I acted in the role of editor. I also sat down with a translator for about 15 hours over the span of one week, where we went sentence by sentence through the interviews and translated them to English. At night I went back to my hotel and wrote English summaries of each interview with direct quotations, which my translator and I then sat together as she translated the summaries into the written Burmese language. I anticipate a great deal of work back in Santa Clara of actually subtitling the footage and putting all my content together into a single page of marketing materials with both English and Burmese translations for Koe Koe Tech to use.

Filming with a beautiful family in Mandalay. These adorable twins loved the camera. || Mandalay

With one of the twins in Mandalay. || Mandalay

Something I have especially enjoyed while being in Myanmar is fully immersing myself in the culture. I have loved eating the food, taking the taxis, carrying an umbrella everywhere I go; all the little things that make my daily life in Yangon different than my life at home. Every day presents a new challenge, whether it be a power outage, cockroaches in the bathroom, or haggling down the price of a taxi in Burmese. These are things many people would complain about, everything is different, but that is what makes my daily life so exciting here. The people here are so welcoming and kind. I wish to visit Myanmar again in the future. I can not imagine never coming back.

To Conclude…

The work I have done here in Myanmar has challenged me to be incredibly organized and on top of managing my own work and the people helping me with it. I am very excited about the final product I will produce for Koe Koe Tech and am beginning to see my hard work pay off. This experience has been especially great in solidifying my love of every aspect of the film process. I have been incredibly busy, working hard, and loving every second of being in this beautiful country with the most compassionate and selfless people I have ever met. I have learned so much about myself and what I believe to be important in life.

Inle Lake, Shan State

Growing Up

Family. That is the word that comes to mind when I think about the most important aspect of my life. Growing up, I was taught: family above everything. Every holiday was with a different side. Thanksgiving was dedicated to all my cousins coming together; trekking our way up to Buffalo, New York, often times an 8+ hour journey from our home in Connecticut due to heavy, slushy Early-Winter snow. My memories of Thanksgiving consist of many Texas Hold’em tournaments, family touch football, and a ridiculously massive feast with no less than three whole turkeys. Christmas was dedicated to my father’s side; loud and Puerto Rican. Every year we would attend the Quiñones family Christmas party, and each time I felt like there was at least one new second-cousin I’d meet. When I’d visit my grandparents in Florida I would spend the day with my grandma, learning how to make Surullitos de Maiz, Picadillo, and Empanadillas. I’d watch Telenovelas with my grandma, her pausing every few minutes to explain what was happening, or I’d sit with my quiet grandfather in his studio, him holding my hand as he let me ‘help’ him paint. I grew up surrounded by rich culture and a loving family, something I thought to be normal for all the other kids in my class too. I learned however that my experience was different; it was special. I am so lucky to come from a family with such different parts, each its own and integral in how I am as a person.

Megan, Abby, Kadee, Emily, and Jim on a hike in Macedonia State Park in Connecticut.

I have two older sisters who have and always will be my best friends. Megan teaches me every day to push myself out of my comfort zone and always just “go for it”. She is daring, bold, and an incredibly strong willed individual. Abby teaches me to be smart, organized, and loving. She is level headed; she is my rock. My parents raised us all to be kind, do our best, and most importantly be individual. We are all so different, and that is because they let us explore, never pressured us to do anything, and embraced our uniqueness. It is because of them that I am at school so far from home, trying something new and loving every second of it.

Abby, Emily, and Megan.

School

For as long as I can remember, I have always loved movies. My sister Abby and I would write scripts with our friends at a young age, thinking each time, “This is the one! This is the one that will make it to Hollywood!” We dreamed big and turned our wild imaginations into words. I’d watch films and television shows carefully, thinking about ways they could be improved and songs that could fit better into different scenes.

I left High School with a rather weak sense of self. I realized that I felt the need to try to be something I was not just to please others and fit in. An example of this is that I played a sport every season and by the time I was a Junior in High School I was miserable. I was not competitive, and realized eventually that I did not need to be doing this. Nobody was pressuring me into sports, I was just pressuring myself, and thought I would be weak if I quit. Eventually when I did however, the world didn’t come crashing down. Nobody reprimanded me for quitting. I was okay… in fact I was relieved.

When I came to Santa Clara, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I took an introductory Philosophy course my Freshman year that changed my outlook on almost everything. This was a class I loved going to. I was taught how to logically construct an argument and learned something new about the world and myself each day. Another class that shaped me was Introduction to Digital Filmmaking, a class that my fellow Comm majors complained about so much that I was very nervous for, but ended up changing my perspective on my future. I loved it. I picked up a Philosophy minor and a Cinema Studies pathway. I learned that my detail oriented nature is very useful in film editing, and I have grown so much in learning what I want to do. This is something that I’m sure will change, and maybe always will, but for now it is something that I love and can not wait to continue learning about.

Emily filming for her class, Short Fiction Production.

Builders Beyond Borders

As a middle school student, I heard about this organization called Builders Beyond Borders (B3) that took groups of high school students to the developing world to work alongside peace corps volunteers to complete a project. The organization took kids from all of Fairfield County Connecticut, but not many from my high school participated. I honestly just thought that this opportunity sounded too cool to pass up; I thought to myself, how else will I be able to see these parts of the world? So, I packed my bags, and spent the Spring break of my Freshman year in a tiny town in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador. I met some of the most incredible people there, and I began to gain global perspective. I always knew that there were people in the world who lived much differently than I did, but it took going to Ecuador and full immersion into their culture for me to realize what that meant. For the next three years, I traveled with B3 to different countries in the developing world for my Spring break. After Ecuador, I went to Nicaragua, then Guyana, and lastly the Dominican Republic. I slept in hammocks, tents and on the ground. I went days without showering, and made some of the best friends I have to this day.

Emily in Nicaragua.

I could not be more excited to combine my passion for filmmaking and storytelling with my passion for learning about and impacting the lives of others for the better. The experience that I will have as a Global Social Benefit Fellow is one I know will continue to shape me as a person and allow me to grow.