Interview

The person that we decided to interview was from Uganda, who later on in his life left Africa and came to America. He was always fleeing different places in Africa mainly by foot. He was born in Uganda but later there were problems that came about and he fled to Ethiopia, and then from there to Sudan, and then to America. He had a family so he wanted to find a steady place to stay because he would always have to take his older sun and his baby and his wife on extremely long walks.

The interview took place during school hours but at an African Alliance place where they help people coming from Africa get started in America. They help them find a job a place to stay and the other necesities. We first were introduced to the person who started the African Alliance. After meeting him we met up with one of the people who had actually left Africa and then came to America. There were five people in a room total, four of them being the group memebers including me, the other being the interviewee. We were in a smaller room with a video camera and one of the group memebers being the person who would be wrtiting down the material. Having both a camera and a note taker would make sure that we would get down everything that he said.

I really like the whole expierence of talking to someone who was actually there and getting a first hand expierence. During the time that we were interviewing him there were times where I couldn’t believe that he actually had to go through that. I remember one of the times where he was running away from soldiers and said, “I was running away from the bullets so fast it was like I was a bullet”. There was one time where I felt sad because when he was about seven years old his younger brother died at a young age beause there was no medical care to help out his brother and the nearest hospital was a couple days away.

When we were going into the place where we would be doing the interview I wasn’t nervous because I have done an interview with another woman for a different project and when I was doing a job interview over the summer. We had started to plan out the questions about a week or two before the interview so we would have a good ammount of questions ready. On a few of the questions that we had asked really led us into further smaller ones and ended up being able to have him answer them for quite some time.

From this interview I have been able to improve my skills in the way I write questions and make sure that I am able to get a lot of information from just a few questions. This was a great learning expeirence and I wouldn’t mind doing another one. How this changed my thinking was of how if I was going to research papers and other things I could always try and find people to interview.