Professional Issues Day

"I believe in the sun even when it is not shining, in love when i'm alone, and in God even when he is silent."

(inscription found scratched in a wall in germany by someone hiding from Nazi concentration camps)

War is something that in our society we have to read about/watch on tv/listen about, on a daily basis. Sadly this is the world our children are growing up in. As a child, I was exposed to the idea of war quite early on. My family is from Croatia, which was involved in a bitter war for our freedom in the early ninties. This effected our family quite a bit since most of my mothers family still lives in Croatia, I remember quite vividly watching or listening to the news and wondering if my young cousins were safe. This is why this professional issues day was so moving for me. It brought me back to a reality that I seem to sometimes forget. The speech that the Holocaust survivor was heart breaking to say the least.It reiterated the fact that we must learn from our past mistakes and hope not to repeat them. This session made me think back to the recent movie 'Freedom Writers', where at trouble youth were taken with the story of Anne Frank and invited the Woman who hid her family to their school. Giving students a link to a story such as a first hand experience gives them a more realistic view to the issue. I would like to applaud those that organized this event because it was by far the most rewarding workshop/session thus far.