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Hello everyone.
My name is Jillian Godinez.
I'm a junior here at Mount Holyoke College.
I study economics and history with a minor in public history
and archives.
And I'm going to tell you all about my internship on Rapa Nui
this summer.
You guys might know it as Easter Island.
So first off, before I tell you about the internship,
where is Easter Island or Rapa Nui?
Anyone have an idea?
Shout it out.
Yes, Mom?
[LAUGHTER]
2,000 miles west of Chile.
3,000 miles.
So it's over here in this region.
You could see it zoomed in a little more.
And fun fact, some of the locals call
it the belly button of the earth because if you
look at it this way, it kinds of looks like a little navel.
So I was working with a non-profit called Terevaka
Archaeological Outreach.
It's a program that focuses on filling
the gaps in the education system that the kids on the island
have.
Because Rapa Nui is on the Chilean education system,
all of the classes, curriculum, books and everything
is based off of what the students in Chile learn.
And that doesn't really leave much for them
to learn about their own island.
So the point of the program is to do a two week intensive
camping summer camp.
Well, it's our summer, but their winter.
And they live on the campsite and just do
intensive work learning about their own history
and the island.
And it's completely free to all the students
and it's totally inclusive.
And they have to apply to do it.
So it's really students that want to do it.
This is us on a field trip going out.
Right now, that is Ahu Akahanga.
And you can see they're getting a tour and learning about it.
And the cool thing about the island, it's 63 square miles.
So it's very small and isolated like you saw on the map.
But there's no sort of public transportation.
So unless your family has a car, kids aren't really
getting to all the sites.
So when we went on the field trips,
there were a lot of the places that the kids were like,
oh, this is my first time here.
I've never been here.
So it's really opening them up to their own island,
which they already know so well.
And at these sites, we go through oral history and talk
about whatever they know about it from their parents
and grandparents.
And then we would have some of the leaders
that we have, like right over here.
We had [INAUDIBLE] and then my two bosses [INAUDIBLE]..
And they'd talk about all the sites.
We even went when it was raining.
So that's [INAUDIBLE] to high.
And see the kids right here are writing in their notebooks.
They have these little field notebooks.
And they'd go around recording all the information
of the lectures.
And then they'd go into a google document
and add what they learned from the lesson and also
the oral history that they know from their family.
So we could have it all collected in a database, which
is really exciting.
As I said, we were all camping together.
So this is right outside of the camp grounds.
The camp was divided into two parts.
I was working with the archeology section.
But another section was with conservation and engineering.
So at the end of the day, we would all get together
and talk about what we learned.
The kids that were working with the engineering program,
they were doing sustainability.
So they were thinking about how could they
get wind turbines on the island or how would solar energy work.
Just because it is so isolated and the island does
run off of generators.
So they're trying to think of more sustainable solutions
to keep the island running, especially
because of the tourism that they have every year.
This is the campsite again.
All the kids hanging out.
We were to say, glamping.
So glamorous camping.
There were bathrooms and there was a wonderful Hotel Explora
which donated all the facilities to us.
So we were camping outside the whole time,
but we had bathroom facilities and we had
chefs cooking all our meals.
So it wasn't as intense as two weeks of camping sounds.
I was camping for a month though.
So the reason I'm showing you another map
is because like I said, a lot of the kids
don't know all of the places on the island.
And it makes sense because there are
over 800 moai, which are the big statue heads that I
can talk about more later.
There scattered all throughout the island.
And we were camping around right here
and we would go on these walking field
trips all around the coast.
So my group would go down here and we'd go up the coast
or we'd go here.
Other days, we hiked the northern coast all the way up
here.
And really going by foot, you can see so much more
because the whole island is just dense
with archaeological sites.
That just walking for five minutes,
you can find something new and write about it
and study and learn.
Which is really exciting.
So we went out on trips and we'd find moai on the ground
like that.
And we'd take our GPS units and record the decimal degrees
of where we were and what we found and the students would
do a scaled drawing of the sites that they found.
And then we'd go back into books or to this [? toponimia ?]
document, which is an old 19th century
book which recorded all of the history of when the Dutch found
the site.
And then we'd make an Excel sheet
comparing the history we could find on the sites already.
And then the history that the students
knew from their family and their grandparents.
And we'd record it all in this giant Excel document that
was just tracking the transformation of all
the ahus and sites.
So these are the kids working in the archives
and what's really special about this moment right
here is the students were prepping for a debate
that we gave them a topic and forced them to argue one side.
And the topic that they were arguing
was should a moai, which is very famous
and has significance to the island, which
is in the British Museum, should it
be brought back to the island or should it
stay where it is, where it's safe and protected?
And it was really interesting to hear the local students having
that argument where some of them truly
felt like it deserves to be somewhere
else so other people can learn.
And others thought no, we've been robbed.
This is not right.
We need it back.
So just getting that perspective from the students
was really exciting.
That's ahu to high, just another wonderful ahu.
So I was really going for the internship
to facilitate and basically be a glorified camp counselor
and teach the kids about their own island.
But quickly I learned I knew nothing.
And they knew everything, and I was really learning from them
the whole time.
So it was really exciting.
And it was a symbiotic learning process.
So I was teaching them how to use
books and research and my history side
and helping them out with that.
But they were really teaching me all about what
it means to know world history.
And the problem with world history
is if it's not saved or recorded or passed down,
it's lost forever.
So that's why the Excel sheet that we were doing
was so important because it's really preserving history that
would otherwise be forgotten.
So all in all, it was a wonderful experience.
Thank you.
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