In two weeks I will be beginning my final year at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ. During my time at McGill, I’ve pursued a Joint Honours degree in Political Science and International Development with a minor in Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies. My interest in global affairs stems partly from my family history; my mother immigrated to Canada at the age of twenty after her family was targeted by gangs on the outskirts of the Mathare slums in Nairobi. When I was old enough to hear them, she would tell me stories about groups of men who surrounded her house brandishing machetes and peering through the windows. She also told me stories about the oceanside trips her family took to the small town of Malindi, and how much she missed Kenya’s warmth and natural beauty. Her relationship with Canada was complicated; she struggled to reconcile the material comforts of living in a wealthy, privileged country with the realities of the global systems of exploitation that maintain structural violence and poverty in countries like Kenya while enriching countries like Canada.
As a Political Science and International Development student, I hoped to better understand the complex web of relations that governs interactions between countries, as well as my own place within that structure. My goal for this summer was to find an internship that would allow me to work in service of people in other areas of the world without positioning myself as a Western saviour. After searching through McGill’s database, I found The Advocates for Human Rights, an international NGO and legal group based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Advocates work on a wide range of issues spanning dozens of countries across the Global North and South. They run a legal clinic for Afghan refugees seeking to enter the United States; they conduct research about global human rights violations and submit that research to bodies at the United Nations; they monitor court proceedings in local county courthouses; they train human rights defenders in other countries; they monitor the emergence of the global far right movement; and they collect evidence of war crimes for the International Criminal Court, among other projects.
My primary task was to conduct research about far-right groups in Spain, India, Sweden, and the United States. I also co-wrote and researched a shadow report for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, a treaty body of the United Nations that seeks to monitor and uphold the rights of women around the world. The most difficult task I dealt with however was participating in interviews that The Advocates conducted with Ukrainians over video call. The purpose of these interviews was to gather evidence of war crimes that could support the potential prosecution of Russia at the International Criminal Court. Some of the calls that I sat in on and transcribed were harrowing; Ukrainian civilians would tell us about entire schools, hospitals, and communities that had been blown apart during the Russian invasion. However, while I found these meetings emotionally challenging, they also generated some of the most productive projects of my internship. During one call, staff at The Advocates met with a Ukrainian man whose young daughter had lost her arm in the midst of the fighting. The hospital she was in had run out of prosthetics, and her father had been searching for months to find her an artificial arm. I reached out to prosthetic manufacturers and charities around the world, and was finally able to connect the Ukrainian family with a clinic in CÄ“sis, Latvia that had agreed to create a prosthetic for free.
NGOs often find it difficult to conduct humanitarian work without imposing Western constructs and ideologies upon other countries, but I found that The Advocates always approached global issues with humility and tact. I feel that this summer I have come to understand more about the international system, as well as the ways in which it both fails and succeeds to protect the world’s most vulnerable people. I believe that the skills and experience I gained over the course of my internship will allow me to approach my university courses with a more nuanced and practical understanding of humanitarian work.
I did not receive academic credit for my internship. However, I did receive a generous funding package from McGill’s Arts Internship Office. The funding I received allowed me to support myself financially this summer, as well as to save money I earned on the side for graduate school. Thank you to everyone at the AIO for making my internship possible this summer.
