Direction

After being accepted as a co-editor of Namaste, I went on to meet the other two internees, Stefanie and Komal. We sat down for our  first meeting on January 26^th in the opening of the spring semester. We talked about the traditional aspects of getting the journal completed. We knew we would have to publicize for submissions, which would require flyers, listserv e-mails and speaking in front of large lecture halls. An early lesson I learned was that often time asking at the individual level worked more effectively then asking around at mass. We were lucky to have may friends in the human rights and related fields, which meant we also had a generous pool of perspective authors to ask for work from. During this first meeting we also talked about the direction we wanted to take the journal. We wanted accessibility and connectivity in our publication. The suggestion was made to try and involve the arts and something we began calling “personal reflection.” Over the winter break I had taken a trip to Rwanda as part of the Unesco program. One of the most beneficial aspects of the trip arose upon my return. Friends and family were eager to hear about my travels and took stock in my stories. They were vicariously learning about human rights though listening to my travel stories. I saw this as a great medium to get the element of understanding and connectivity between author and reader that we wanted in our journal. Including dairy like reflections on influential human rights related trips would become a focus of our edition of Namaste.