Today’s experience was a unique synthesis of two different mediums of art, each from different points in history and each from entirely different areas of the globe. The project commingled the sounds of Verdi’s Requiem with photography of the present day atrocities of Darfur.
This project certainly applied to our wider class focus of hearing the voices of the impoverished. It did so not only by adding a global understanding of the impoverished, as opposed to just a national one, but also by providing a universal perspective to the plights of genocide and poverty. In Verdi’s time death was just as painful of a thought as it is today. The wounds left by murder and famine will always remain strong with those who have lost loved ones to such plights regardless of nationality or time. For this reason Verdi’s Requiem can be just as useful as a means of comforting those who have experienced loss today as it was in the 19th century Italy. It can still elicit sympathy and compassion for those families who’s loved ones have starved or been murdered in Sudan as it did for similar situations in 19th century Europe. This project applied to our course especially in that even though there are barriers of language, religion and culture somehow a common message of compassion shows through these different mediums of art. A traditionally Christian requiem has great depth in elaborating on the suffering of the Muslim Sudanese and likewise the suffering of these Sudanese people applies a stark image to the concept of loss and suffering that is dealt with in the requiem and together the two put into perspective those true morals like compassion and the importance ending suffering which are so vital in the human endeavor.
From this work I gained an enhanced understanding of what it means to act as a global citizen and reach across cultures, the core of which depends on finding the basic moral foundation that all civil societies are based off of and applying it in one’s daily affairs with others. This most basic foundation is the concern for the well being of all people, the destruction of pain and suffering.
January 2007 Archives
Born into Brothels was a tragic view into the lives of prostitutes and their children in India and all the troubles they face. The film documented the lives of children who have been born into brothels amidst the struggle of the director of this documentary to teach the children photography so that they could improve their lives, finding them good schools through financing their education by selling the best photographs they made. It seems that in the end this project worked for 1 girl but the rest were put right back into the tragic lives they have always known.
This film was quite important to our understanding the lives of the marginalized and the impoverished. In this case prostitutes in India are both impoverished and greatly marginalized. In India the government takes the stance that prostitution is legal behind closed doors, however this stance is accompanied by stiff punishments when prostitutes get caught in the open, and by a strong cultural emphasis on castigating prostitutes. In the movie this was elaborated on in a way by the fact that hardly any school would take the children of prostitutes. In a way this movie also highlighted the suffering of the marginalized caused by government oppression. It showed how the government is more concerned with creating social restrictions on its people than in developing the infrastructure, such as the roads, that India so badly needs. It is important in studying the lives of the marginalized to realize all the different forms poverty takes throughout the world, not just in the U.S..
When I reflect on the experience I had while watching this movie I can say that my thinking changed through my gaining an inhanced understanding of the many problems suffered by the poor in India. I realized the immense roal the government plays in the perpetuation of this problem by being everywhere except the few places it should be. The government could and should be spending time and money developing India’s infrastructure and further opening India’s markets to the kind of foreign investment that will provide the funds necessary for the development of its infrastructure and thereby lifting many out of poverty. Instead India’s government is spending time and money creating one of the largest millitaries in the world and marginalizing and impoverishing certain members of their society like prostitutes and homosexuals (homosexuality is illegal in India with jail time). The consequenses of such actions were masterfully captured on Born into Brothels through a look into the lives of prostitutes’ children and the few oppertunities they have in society to escape their terrible conditions.
Today’s presentation on world hunger provided a multitude of different ideas for combating world hunger which in some ways penetrated to the core purpose of our course.
The presentation “A Silent Killer” focused on the problems of hunger in the global south, particularly in Africa and South America. In a great many of these countries hunger is widespread in part because the people of these countries don’t have the material means or the education to be self sufficient, a problem that can almost always be directly attributed to bad governance. To combat these root causes of hunger advocates for aid in this film presented many plans for alleviating hunger. In those instances where a lack of education has been a root cause of hunger these advocates for aid have pointed to situations that promise or have shown great success in combating hunger. In one such situation the knowledge of the tendency of desmodium (a plant) to provide nitrogen rich moist soil and repel stem boars, saved thousands of crops and markedly improved the lives of many impoverished people in Kenya by improving the health of the crops while creating much higher yields and thereby generating larger incomes for the general populace of farmers. Another such situation examined the local tradition of eating a crop known as hoodia for the purpose of suppressing hunger. Because the aid workers in the region were educated with a global perspective, a chance that most Africans sadly do not have, they were able to see the potential market value a plant like this one would have as an appetite suppressant drug in a country like the U.S. were a large percentage of the population is obese. Such a plan could potentially have very prosperous effects for that region if perhaps companies who market the drug could give jobs to the farmers willing to grow the product and even better yet, perhaps a certain percentage of profit that the drug company makes from this product could go back into funding schools and education facilities for many of the impoverished in Africa. There is a similar project that has been suggested in Afghanistan where the U.S. government is finding out that exterminating poppies is costly and ineffective in hurting the drug trade. The project instead attempts to allow farmers to market the opium from their poppies to supply the world’s opium based medications. In Another such plan involving education to combat hunger biologists have genetically engineered crops that are capable of repelling insects and thereby increasing yields even more and eliminating hunger to a greater extent, a plan which is also common to one being carried out in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh local inhabitants were having much difficulty coping with heavy flooding which destroyed much of their rice crop and so scientists helped by genetically engineering the crop to be more resistant to flooding and thereby increasing the yields. These plans can prove to be quite prosperous especially when the nations of the third world will have the education to implement these plans on their own and generate their own wealth and finally escape the trap of world poverty and hunger. The other plans that were summarized in this video were not so much solutions to the problems of hunger but more a way of using government programs and bureaucratic red tape to cover over the problem of hunger. Plans like Fome Zero in Brazil that were outlined in the video have sought to fight the problem of world hunger by creating government subsidized restaurants and massive redistributions of wealth in the form of property.
This topic is not just relevant to a select few of the topics this class covered last term, it is a direct representation of much of what this course is and much of what it attempts to accomplish. That is to say, the point of this course is in many ways a way of educating students here at Concordia to be global citizens. The only way to become a global citizen is to be conscious of the ways of knowing by which people apprehend their environment and then apply those ways of knowing to the serious global issues affecting the world for the betterment of the people of this world. It is for this reason why this education on world hunger is so deeply connected to all the topics we have covered so far, because all have been a necessary progression towards this goal.
With this said, as far as the topic of world hunger goes it is indisputable that the best reforms to end hunger and poverty are those reforms which help people to help themselves because once people can help themselves free from poverty the chance that they will fall back in is slim. It is these types of plans like the ones explicated earlier that use education to solve problems, rather than just covering them with red tape, that are most likely to succeed in making the impoverished and the hungry self sufficient and helping them to free themselves from poverty. Furthermore such plans like those that use bureaucratic red tape to cover the problems of hunger are not likely to catch on either, because of their tendency to impoverish the taxpayers who are subsidizing the costs of these restaurants and their tendency to create dependents who never really posses the necessary education to free themselves from hunger. This is aside from the fact that the redistribution of property is unconstitutional in all 1st world countries and therefore to support such a program would be to go against the freedom and democracy that 1st world countries represent. In over all reflection it was also quite a novel idea on the part of the activists in this movie to suggest a few reasonable reforms the U.S. and other nations could make that would benefit third world countries, the most important of these being free trade. The point implied by these men which is quite similar to the arguments made by other advocates of free trade is that the unreasonable amounts of tariffs and quotas that are placed on trade by governments are pricing farmers in third world countries out of the market and causing famines. This is because when a tariff is applied to a good it raises the cost of production for that good. This means that in third world countries where seeds to plant crops are already expensive enough due to scarcity, the extra cost added on by tariffs would ruin these poor farmers. The other point that was made was that poverty could potentially be cut in half by 2015 if the U.S. were only willing to shell out 1.5 billion in funds annually. This is a reform which would certainly not be hard to do if the country weren’t already spending so much money much of it unnecessarily. The U.S. spends 16.8 billion alone on the NASA space program and another 36.5 billion on the department of homeland security and another 2 billion on just the fuel for the U.S. postal service alone, not to mention the amount of money that is being used for the Iraq war.
All in all the video The Silent Killer is an important one for helping people to realize the potential for good they have in their world and addressing an issue which can no longer remain silent on the backburner of U.S. foreign policy.
