I can't believe we only have one more week! Time has gone so quickly and I am already getting sad knowing that I only have one more week at work with my colleagues.
I have been working at the Falls Community Council with their oral history archive. I have been reading transcripts of life story interviews. It has been absolutely fabulous! I have read interviews from people who were in paramilitary organizations on both sides, people who were ordinary civilians holding all kinds of personal views, people who were children during the conflict and people who were grandparents at the time. I have heard personal accounts, feelings, and opinions about so many events, people, and experiences during and about the conflict.
What has been most significant to me is that I have learned so much about these events from different viewpoints that it puts history we have learned and murals and monuments we have seen in perspective. Yesterday I was walking along the Newtonards Road and passed a church, St. Mathews Church. Across the street from this church was a small memorial with hanging flower baskets and benches. A plaque said it was to remember two Protestants who died at the Battle of St. Mathews on 27 June 1970 when shooting broke out from the church. The day before I happened on this memorial I read the interview of someone who witnessed this shooting. Before reading the interview I had never heard of this shoot-out, but after reading the personal account and feeling the emotions that were expressed in it, the memorial moved me in a very emotional way. Though it was small and could easily be overlooked, the message that it sends and the grief it remembers is strong and, even after all these years, remains powerful.
I know that, of course, I can never really understand what it was like during the conflict, but I have started to understand the wide range of effects the violence has had on everyone who was living in Northern Ireland at the time, even if they had nothing to do with it directly. My work has made my time here immensely more powerful because I feel as if I am no longer a complete outsider in a strange place with a complicated history, but I have a personal connection, a personal understanding of the past so that I can understand the present, I have context to help explain what is going on around me.
Lily Doron
'17
I have been working at the Falls Community Council with their oral history archive. I have been reading transcripts of life story interviews. It has been absolutely fabulous! I have read interviews from people who were in paramilitary organizations on both sides, people who were ordinary civilians holding all kinds of personal views, people who were children during the conflict and people who were grandparents at the time. I have heard personal accounts, feelings, and opinions about so many events, people, and experiences during and about the conflict.
What has been most significant to me is that I have learned so much about these events from different viewpoints that it puts history we have learned and murals and monuments we have seen in perspective. Yesterday I was walking along the Newtonards Road and passed a church, St. Mathews Church. Across the street from this church was a small memorial with hanging flower baskets and benches. A plaque said it was to remember two Protestants who died at the Battle of St. Mathews on 27 June 1970 when shooting broke out from the church. The day before I happened on this memorial I read the interview of someone who witnessed this shooting. Before reading the interview I had never heard of this shoot-out, but after reading the personal account and feeling the emotions that were expressed in it, the memorial moved me in a very emotional way. Though it was small and could easily be overlooked, the message that it sends and the grief it remembers is strong and, even after all these years, remains powerful.
I know that, of course, I can never really understand what it was like during the conflict, but I have started to understand the wide range of effects the violence has had on everyone who was living in Northern Ireland at the time, even if they had nothing to do with it directly. My work has made my time here immensely more powerful because I feel as if I am no longer a complete outsider in a strange place with a complicated history, but I have a personal connection, a personal understanding of the past so that I can understand the present, I have context to help explain what is going on around me.
Lily Doron
'17