Here are a few of my thoughts from this semester:
Day with Genevieve-
- Having humanitarian workers talk about their mental health should be something we talk about more. It is wild to think that her is Genevieve living with PTSD from her time overseas, home for a year before the diagnosis, and she hasn’t really talked about it with anyone. We have to start this conversation so that people know exactly what this work entails. I wonder thought if people start to talk about more if that will make people not want to do the work. Americans have a bad habit of not wanting to do things if it will negatively impact them in any way.
- In the case of the DRC it is hard to send people into an area where the government will not help to protect these people. They need aid work over there as I did research about Ebola in the country. Every time aid work decreases the Ebola rates rise. For countries such as them that can’t maintain stable infrastructure the importance of aid work has to be communicated. I did a epidemiology presentation on the Ebola crisis in the DRC which is why it interested me to hear her perspective. I didn’t realize how much I would talk about humanitarian aid in my presentation. It got me thinking more and more how Public Health and Sociology really go together and my knowledge in each of these majors has helped the other. Public health is everywhere and so is sociology.
Joey’s Presentation
- Honor among thieves
- cycle of poverty because farmers in the dry season have to try to work around certain things but in order to survive during the down season they put themselves deeper into poverty
- This just adds proof that pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is not a good enough excuse to keep capitalism and the top economic system. All we keep doing is putting impoverished people in this false sense of consciousness that one day we can be like Bill Gates but the system was literally designed to not have that happen.
- sex trafficking- have to sell off their kids in order to make money
- This is actually a global problem that no one really wants to talk about. We immediately want to shame the parents for doing what they did (because it is horrible at the end of the day) but we never talk about how the economic set up of a country forces then to do this.
- aid workers going into those areas are actually creating an environment that perpetuates the sex trafficking by having companies that is donating the money is pressuring the aid workers to do projects that don’t actually benefit the community and so the community has to keep doing the things that perpetuate their poverty and sex trafficking practices
Takeaway from J- sometimes fiction is the work around to talking about things you shouldn’t be talking about. Fiction lets us connect more to the people that need to hear the story than non-fiction. Nonfiction people see its about them and instantly get defensive but with fiction since you don’t immediately tie it to you, you can find patters and be like ‘ohhh that’s kind of what we do’ and hopefully change for the better. Interesting tactic (maybe there’s a better word than tactic) to use when trying to bring change to a unmoving machine.
Aid working being apolitical
- it shouldn’t exist
- it should exist
- can it exist?
- When it comes to natural disaster absolutely it should be apolitical because there is no force to combat because we can’t fight nature. Even if a tornado hits a country that could give us no political gain, if we have the tools to help them then we should
- When it comes to aid in conflict zones then here we should be political. If we know how to end a civil war in a country, then why not do that to overall prevent more deaths rather than just prolonging it. This gets tricky when the people committing the atrocities are people that can benefit the US in some way because then they wouldn’t be as inclined to stop their ‘allies.’
Overall takeaways:
- I thought I wanted to go into the peace corps and then I thought I didn’t and then this class made me for sure not want to go into the aid sector. But, part of me is also of the idea that I can try to fix things from the inside (because that’s just who I am) so now I think I want to go into the aid sector just to be a little rebel within.
- Globalization is the devil. I’ve learned so much about globalization (like how it impacts the physical structure of a city and therefore keeps impoverished people impoverished but makes it so we can’t see them and thus forget the exist) and now its impact on aid work. It really just makes everything so much more complicated than it needs to be and I get that we want to be connected to the world but globalization + capitalism= many bad things.
- Plus, it makes it harder to save the planet
- Are there any straight answers in sociology? The answer is simply no. There are too many things to consider when trying to fix a problem. It’s not just looking at the government, or the economy, or the culture. It’s all of it. Maybe deep down at the start of modern society an intended latent function of all the systems was to become so interwoven that change becomes this impossible large task that no one wants to take on.
Theme of this class: Woah, well there’s no solution