Day 2: The Beauty of Gray

"This is not a black and white world...to be alive, I say the colors must swirl. And I believe that maybe today, we will all get to appreciate the beauty of gray."- Live
   
    If I had to describe our entire day in a song lyric, I would choose the quote above by the band Live. We spent most of our day watching two court dockets on domestic violence. What started off as a somewhat chaotic courtroom scene with many different cases being brought up during a general session court, turned into a deep and gripping afternoon. At first, we were listening to many different cases where people were either asking to have protection against another party or have the one that was already in place removed. A common factor, or I feel even perhaps a catalyst, to people asking for and removing protection were if they had children. It seemed that children played a major role in whether people felt the need to take action to get away from their situations, but at the same time... a need to allow the child to have a relationship seemed to be a big motivator to let the other party back in the picture.
   During the afternoon, we came back to the courtroom to watch two cases that both touched our hearts. The one that was very moving domestic violence case involved a woman who had the courage to take action against a husband who held a gun to her while she was breastfeeding their baby, but she spoke no English so a simple 911 call was not so simple in her life. Her husband, the defendant, was in the courtroom but we all noticed that he never ever looked up at his wife during the whole time she testified. Watching the eye contact that the clients were making with each other, the judges and lawyers really told us a lot about eye contact.
   While we were in a courtroom watching such intense and troubling situations, Southern hospitality brightended our experience. We were very lucky to have a judge whose rulings we all LOVED and found to be excellent, speak with us about any questions that we had about the cases and domestic violence disputes in general. He gave us a lot of insight and was funny and sweet enough to make sure that we were well taken care of during our trip!
  After we came back from our moving experiences, we reflected through writing and it was lovely because everyone wrote about something they observed in our day of court, then the rest of us got to write our thoughts on that point, one by one. This was great because it allowed us to see how everyone was in the situation, we all took away something different. We then had a great conversation about our thoughts on various cases we saw, and deep concepts that have been coming up throughout the domestic violence topic.
It seemed, after everything we all thought and felt, we realized that nothing is black or white, and there are a lot of gray areas in life where reactions to different situtions are different for each person, hence the quote I started this blog off with.
   We headed back to the ever hospitable University of Tennessee and got to make dinner with food donated to us by the Catholic Center and relax and enjoy each other's company.
   
   I look forward to tomorrow being even better, and learning more about these wonderful people I am here with!