Hello and welcome! My name is Sienna Park, the founder and author of this blog.
I am a student at Kent School, super interested in International Relations, Middle Eastern Studies, and East Asian Studies (If you couldn’t tell from my entries!). I’m from South Korea.
From the picture, many of you might think I owe an explanation for why I started this blog. No, I am not from Afghanistan. No, I don’t speak Pashto or Persian. No, I’ve never lived there, ever.
In fact, I used to not care about any of this. I was deeply into finding my cultural heritage as a South Korean and investigating China as a rising global power. I refused to come out of the comfort zone of my look-alikes and life-alikes, of the East Asian international students. I even wrote a couple of research papers on this!
The turning point was when I was interning at the Slovenian Embassy in Seoul. There, Ambassador Müller told me about European refugees and the tricky balance between humanity and politics. I got immediately drawn into it because my best friend I’ve made in the U.S. had also fled from Afghanistan (not exactly a refugee, because she is in a special situation). I’ve heard too many stories about this to simply turn away.
Because I had a couple more friends from Afghanistan, I started asking them questions I’d never asked before. I asked about their fathers, brothers, the Taliban, families, and the realities. It was more than I could digest.
Surprisingly, these stories barely make the news, let alone headlines. No one cares about this stuff. But why? These are some of the most unbelievably abusive, almost movie-like, horror stories that these girls have to live through!
That’s when I turned to activism by creating podcasts, starting an Amnesty Chapter, doing professional research, and, finally, starting this blog. This blog is special to me because every week I get to sit down, reflect on the stories I’ve heard and shared through the podcast, our Amnesty activities, and the research, and summarize them in a one-page blog entry. I try not to digress too much and focus on my activism topic (hate speech), because I get to cover other parts elsewhere.
Middle East is a crucial part of the world economy, but it’s also controversial, mainly because its cultural/religious doctrines clash with Western ones. Afghanistan is a place where those doctrines cross the line of culture and become an abuse. What triggers me is that even women who have escaped Afghanistan, or women who are trying to make things better for other women, have to suffer online abuse from complete strangers who are ignorant of the concept of rights.
Therefore, one wish I have with this blog is to make a small step forward in letting people know of the harms of hate speech and online abuse, and to encourage further online activism.
Thank you always for reading my entries and staying alert on this matter. It means a lot to the girls and myself.
