The Struggles and Difficulties with Oral History

     During my internship with Hope To You Community Church, the main project I had the honor of working on is the collection and writing up of the oral history of the church. The process of the internship included me creating my own questions to ask certain members of the church’s congregation about their experience with Hope To You Community Church and compiling each of the congregation’s statements and creating a coherent narrative. Through this process I had experienced a few difficulties through this project. As with anything that deals with memories there will be issues of information matching as I had experienced with this project. There were three people that I interviewed that were part of the church’s congregation for many years and when I questioned a certain event in the church’s history to each person, all three gave me different years. I was prepared for this sort of issue and had hoped that I could get a clearer answer from interviewing the founding pastor of Hope To You Community Church. However, that particular scheduling was and still is the biggest difficulty I faced with this internship. The founding pastor never got back to me about a good date to do a video call and when I offered to send him a document with the questions he could answer he never answered those messages leaving me to estimate and give an in-between time period for that event. The other difficulty I faced with this project is of course the scheduling of these interviews, since it was during the summer many of these people wanted to go on vacation and I had to schedule around that but the hardest bit was scheduling an interview with a person in the Philippines. Having a twelve hour difference but we were able to find a time that worked. Difficulties and hardships are bound to happen in any form and with resilience and creativity I was able to work around those difficulties even if it was a bit difficult.