Published: July 28, 2008 12:34 am            

Q&A: Jillian Ferris teaching in Taiwan

Jillian Ferris, 22, is a native of Lockport who attended John Pound Elementary School, Emmet Belknap and Lockport High School. She studied Latin for four years and was editor of the Lockport yearbook and newspaper.

The daughter of Gary and Laurie Ferris graduated from Colgate in May, 2008 with a degree in history and education. Jill was the editor of the Colgate Maroon News student newspaper in her junior and senior years.

She studied in Great Britain her junior year and spent almost a month in Australia working with Aborigine people this spring. She is a Fulbright Scholar.

Jill and her sister Kelly, 20, grew up at the Lockport YMCA where their mother works. Jill has worked at Camp Kenan since she was 16 and is the aquatic instructor.

On Thursday, she leaves for Taiwan to teach English to children for 11 months.

QUESTION: What do you do as an aquatic instructor?

ANSWER: I get to go kayaking, canoeing and swimming in the lake every day. It’s awesome. We had a great summer. It’s a lot of fun.

Q: How long have you been going to Camp Kenan?

A: This is my fifteenth summer. I grew up and Kenan and grew up here at the YMCA. The YMCA is where we came after school to take swimming lessons and hang out. I volunteered and attended programs.

Q: What’s it like to be an editor of a college newspaper?

A: It was a lot of work but I lked the news and spreading the word. We were close knit. We did a lot of work and had fun together. It’s the oldest weekly college newspaper in America.

Q: You’ve done some traveling?

A: I spent my junior spring semester living in London. I was doing historical research in the archives of London. I also traveled to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Belgium and Austria and took a spring break in Italy.

Q: What did you do after you graduated in May?

A: I went to Australia for three weeks to be with an Aborigine tribe. It’s complicated. I interned at the art gallery in Colgate and updated their discovered collection of Australian Child Art.

Q: What’s that?

A: There was forcible removable of Aboriginal children from the late 1800s to 1970s. They put the children into camps. In the 1950s a teacher, Noel White, would have them go out on bush walks and he said, ‘draw what you see.’ These 12-13-year-old boys had incredible pastel drawings.

They were shown all over and wound up in Colgate and formed the basis of our art gallery collection. Colgate started to build a relationship with the tribe in Australia and some of the paintings have gone back to Australia. We were doing a lot of community building and relationship building work. We have the largest private collection in the world.

Q: What did you do in Australia?

A: We did a lot of listening, which doesn’t sound really important, but it turned out to be one of the most important things we could have done just because this tribe we were working with, the Noongar, was so decimated by forcible removal. We were working with a bother and sister who were catering our meals.

Q: What happened?

A: She shared her story with us. Her brother was listening to the story and he just started crying. He explained that he never heard his sister’s story before.

They had grown up apart and united when they were older. In that time he had never listened to what she had gone through when she was in the camps. He never knew what it was like to be taken from your parents.

A lot of it was just sharing stories, giving people encouragement to talk.

Q: How are aborigines treated now?

A: It’s a mixed bag. There is still a lot of prejudice there and we were really surprised to see so much prejudices. We were so conscious of tension between aboriginal peoples and European settlers there.

In talking to people we had to be careful not to be judgmental because we’ve had such a terrible history of racial injustice here. It made us look at our own racial situation.

Q: How do you teach English when you don’t know their language in Taiwan

A: I get to study Mandarin while I am there. Right now I can say hello, good-bye and thank you. Hopefully I’ll learn more than that.

We’re working with teachers in the classroom who have some English. I think I was chosen because I have some background in education. I think I’m bringing some education experience to the group.

Q: Are you nervous?

A: I’m scared. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance, so I’m pretty excited about it as well. Still there’s an incredible working experience. There’s an American support network.

I’m expecting to be overwhelmed by a new culture and just have this incredible growing experience. I’m not sure what to expect. I will have to do a lot of things on my own that are a little scary, like getting my haircut or ordering food when I really don’t know what I’m ordering, but I think that makes you a more interesting person.

Contact reporter Bill Wolcott 439-9222, ext. 6246.

        

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