Community makes up a large portion of our daily lives. Community is always around us and can shed a positive or negative light on our environments, personal living, and happiness. Community shapes who we are as a person. Communities also vary based on your location. Throughout my trip I had been mainly exposed to country communities and the people there. I was able to witness a city community for a night as well.
The city community was very much as well what I expected. It was crowded, loud, and chaotic. The group of students and I ventured off at night into the city and got to experience it first hand. To my surprise, I actually witnessed a large street fight between 20 to 25 men around the ages of twenty years old. The fight was violent and one Irish native saw me watching and came over to talk to me and some other students. He expressed to us that this type of behavior normally never happens in Westport and this was the first street fight he had seen in a very long time. This proved to me that even though we were in a city community, that the city was still normally kept peaceful the majority of the time and people were shocked to see this fight happening in their community.
The rest of the trip being in the country, I noticed communities are very calmed, kind, and welcoming. In towns, everyone seems to know everyone. People will walk down the street to their local pub and have a drink with all their neighbors and friends in town. For the most part, everyone is always smiling and wanting to talk to anyone who comes in. Everywhere you walk you see a smiling face and a loud hello, it makes you feel good about where you are. Overall it is clear that the communities are portrayed as positive from the majority of my experiences.
Couple of problems… 1) the photograph does not fit with the topic of community — there must have been images you could have used to reflect community better… It would have been different if you ended your story by talking about how you and your classmates, because of shared experiences and goals, became a community.
2) No direct quote from someone you met and spoke with… more powerful to use the voice and words of the speaker than to paraphrase… paraphrasing is so passive.