Sociology 490 Week 6 Last Blog!

     We finished up week 6 this past Sunday, I cannot believe but we are almost done with our journey here in Italy. I could not be any more saddened by this fact. I feel like it was just yesterday we were in our first week at our new campus in Italy, but it was more than 7 weeks ago. We were stumbling over our Italian the first week and did not know what to do unless we were around our trusted translator, Danilo. But, here we are in the seventh week now and we know how to order things in Italian and greet mostly anyone on the streets. We have come in contact with people of all races, ages, and ethnicities. My eyes have been opened more than ever through this experience. From the buses to the subways, we always have an eye on our bags and belongings because you never know who could be a pickpocket. I don't say this to scare any of you that are reading this blog. This is just the way you have to be in any big city.
     I have found myself calling this place my home and I like it a lot. We go off every weekend on our weekend trips and then we are all excited to go home, back to Rome. We are learning Italian very well, I may add. This last Thursday, we had to interview Italians about their healthcare in a local market. Did I mention, most of them did not know any English?? We were told how to ask them if they wanted to take a survey for our university. We went up to them to ask and many told us no but we just had to keep going and ask other people until we got all 10 interviews done. My partner and I had this same experience with the fact that people would say no and we just had to carry on. We finally found a huge group of University students and they spoke English!! We got all of our interviews done, yay! It was pretty difficult to ask people to do these surveys in Italian but we did just fine after asking a couple people. I really enjoyed doing this assignment because it challenged us to use our Italian and ask random people questions.
     I cannot believe that we know enough Italian now to go up to random people and ask them things in Italian! It just goes to show how much we have learned throughout our journey here in Rome. In these interviews with Italians, we found that some of them had not even been to a hospital in their lives. This surprised us since they have universal healthcare in Italy. I still do not know what my position is on universal healthcare because we keep reading things in our healthcare book and it keeps changing my mind about it. For this week, we finished the book and it did not help my opinion on the issue since I keep getting more knowledge on the issue and it just gets me confused on my position. In our book, Farrel's article speaks about infant mortality rates and life expectancies. He states that the U.S. ranks 29th in the world for infant mortality rate and 48th in life expectancy. This is very surprising since I feel that we are all around a healthy country.
      I am not sure how I feel still about the universal healthcare issue but doing these interviews with Italians that have universal healthcare has helped. I found during these interviews that most Italians do not like the universal healthcare system that they have. The topic that we also had to discuss is Can we cure disease through the power of prayer? I do not believe that this is possible but you do need spiritual power to keep up your hopes and to help you keep fighting against a disease. You need hope to keep fighting in these situtations and if you do not have this, you could just give up. I do think that the power of prayer is important in fighting off a disease but it cannot be cured without medical help. I have enjoyed so much this experience and I have loved learning about healthcare this class as a whole. Thank you to everyone who has been reading my blogs as well!