1/9/2024 0 Comments Raja bobok![]() Her advisers at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), which underwrote her research under one of 14 Senior Thesis Grants, were no less than stunned by her scholarship. The reason behind this apparent paradox, Bobok discovered, rests in a redefinition of Hungarian patriotism through a realignment of young people’s political priorities. In the course of her extensive research she was surprised to find that a disproportionate number of young people in the party - approximately a quarter of them - identify as social liberals. Last year, in addition to a brief stint at the orphanage, Bobok spent three months conducting participant observation research with Hungary’s far-right party, Jobbik, including time in the party’s youth summer camp, for her senior thesis. “I think I owe a lot of who I am today to the orphanage teaching me such serious lessons so early on.” ![]() “They live in poverty but it seems clear there’s always something they took away from the home.” Bobok, too, has taken something away from her time there. “But they work and love their children and are very respectable,” she said. Most of the children she meets are there because of neglect or economic scarcity, and often when they leave the orphanage, they are subject to the same cycles of poverty their parents were. I remember asking how the world could be so unfair just because someone was born in a different place.” Since that revelation, Bobok has returned to the orphanage annually, for anywhere from two to six weeks, getting to know the 30 or so 3- to 17-year-olds who live there. Probably my third day there I completely broke down. ![]() My entire worldview shifted in terms of how I’d seen my life and what was important to me. “I thought I was going to teach an English program for the kids,” she said, “but I realized on the first day that of all the things they needed in the world, fluency in English wasn’t one of them. It was when she spent 10 days working with her aunt in a foster-home “orphanage” in Galospetreu, Transylvania, a region of Romania with a Hungarian ethnic minority. “A big turning point in my life happened when I was 14,” she recalled. She found another sort of family on her visits, though. “I had great opportunities here but wish I could have gotten to know my cousins better,” she said. Though she and her parents and younger brother were active in the expat Hungarian community, they had no extended family nearby. The language we spoke, the foods we ate, the culture we grew up in, and also my family’s values were Hungarian.” “It was difficult in Hungary to express what it was like to live in America,” she said, “and difficult in America to explain that I’m not entirely American. Unlike many immigrants, while growing up Bobok returned to her native land every year. at age 2 when her parents - an internist and a mathematician and software engineer - emigrated in search of economic opportunity, eventually settling in a suburb of Schenectady, N.Y. Born near Budapest, Hungary, she moved to the U.S. Sara Bobok ’19 has always been of two worlds, at home in both and neither. This is one in a series of profiles showcasing some of Harvard’s stellar graduates.
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