Maia Abroad: UWC Waterford

For an upcoming performance evening focusing on gender based violence, mental health, sexual orientation, and gender identify, I wanted to perform one of The Vagina Monologues. I was told no. This is my letter of appeal which I sent roughly five minutes ago, so I haven't heard back yet!  I write to appeal the CMG’s decision regarding the performance of segments of The Vagina Monologues at Asinakekelane’s upcoming Heart to Heart evening. As a student, I was surprised by this decision, as it seemed to contradict the school’s philosophy of creativity and boundary pushing. As an artist, I was angered; as I believe that when you begin to censor art, you censor people. And as a woman and someone who possesses a vagina, I was disappointed; because the issue of vaginas being taboo is frankly one that we ought to have moved past. First, some history. Eve Ensler drafted the Monologues in 1996, basing them off of interviews that she held with 200 women and people with vaginas. They ...

I’ve been back at Waterford for a week, and I’ve been struggling to come up with a topic to write about. I’ve been here helping with orientation, so I could write about that from the perspective of an IB2, but I covered that a lot at the start of last year. I could talk about how I’m managing deadlines and workload but that’s not very interesting and frankly, I should be working on said workload rather than writing about it. Instead, I decided to write about something that’s been a long time coming. I’ve talked about feeling overwhelmed and feeling homesick, but I’ve not really approached the topic directly. Here goes. This might be long and a bit stream of conscious- y, but it’s mostly for me.  For a good part of the last year, I’ve been pretty depressed. I’ve talked about it with friends, and I’ve made jokes about it, but I don’t think I’ve talked about it as fully as I could have. I was worried about being self-pitying. I didn’t want to annoy people. Others have it worse. ...