This past week I took over my greatest responsibility for my summer at CRIS, leading the cultural orientation course, or CO. The CO is organized into two, four hour sessions conducted on Monday and Wednesday mornings and is taught by language group of the arrivals and with the company of a an interpreter. Since the CO is broken up by language group, some of CRIS’s clients will receive the CO within a week of arriving in Columbus or some will receive it close to a month after their arrival. The CO represents a general overview of life in America to newly arrived refugees with topics including culture shock, American culture, American laws, transportation, housing, and how the public health system and tax system work in an effort to generate a basic and lasting understanding of key points for success in American society. At the end of the day, an assessment is given to the clients to test how well they learned and retained important information covered in the CO. I am not going to lie, the information I was given to teach was a good refresher for my own general knowledge of life in America, and the amount of information I was supposed to cover seemed overwhelming at times. Luckily, the current CO teacher observed my initial week of CO classes and gave helpful critiques of how to engage the clients even through a language barrier. My first week of CO was done with CRIS’s Nepali clients who I had been told were the most respectful and attentive of the CO cultural groups and that more challenges lay ahead with the Somali CO next week and the Iraqi one in two weeks. I felt bad that my last post did not contain any pictures, but this time I was able to snap some pics at a local Nepali wedding ceremony I was invited to. One of the perks of this internship is the ability to interact with unique cultural groups and gain access to their traditions and ideas through the clients CRIS serves. Enjoy!