Reflection on Fall '15

Having this be my third Semester being a Peer Educator at UAlbany in looking back on the Semester at a glance it was an amazing Semester of educating others. By having the Lave Hate Behind take place on Indian Quad brought out an array of varying emotions and realization. Students were at times in awe with the realization that some terms that were written on the door were considered hate to another individual. Going further into the Semester we celebrated our CHARGE open house which was titled Charge'D Up and it truly was. Performance by Phenomenal Voices was held in which powerful poems and songs were spoken and sang that impacted others. Comments from attendees were "this is really amazing" and "Please invite us to your next program" and so on and so forth.

Leading into our 3 amazing dialogues, I co-facilitated the dialogue with my colleague Kadeija Brown named "It's my Little Secret" which was a conversation on STD disclosure focusing in on the legal and moral aspects of disclosure and even walking through scenarios in which individuals had to walk through disclosing a "disease" they were diagnosed with. The dialogue began with background information of true stories depicting events in which this occurred. Guest were asked to share personal opinions and reasoning behind their thoughts. After the information was given the guest were handed random envelopes containing slips of paper then asked to randomly swap 3 of the slips in their envelope with another individual. Following this they were asked to look into the envelope and see if they had "caught" a disease and then were asked to walk the crowd through the conversation with another partner. The program shed light on maybe the minority in this conversation were everyone was ready to judge those for keeping a secret it allowed other some insight as to what it was like to walk in the shoes of that individual and the hard decisions that need to be made.

I believe the past semester made an impact and its one that i truly believe needs to continue into further semesters to come.
C.P.E Vanessa Jean