Save the Children #FirstWorldProblems

After leaving our discussion spurred on by the readings on visual documentation I become interested if there has been any shifts in the documentation of Ethiopia and poverty, as well as whether it has coincided with any actual economic or policy changes within the country. Growing up in southern California, many people were less than knowledgable about Ethiopia in any capacity, with the exception of the Feed the Children commercials that launched at the onset of the drought and famine of 1983-1985. I believe a majority of our class is not old enough to remember this actual timeframe in history, however many of the commercials launched in response to this natural disaster were heavily in rotation for a number of years after an extent of the disaster had been contained and in still play to this day to some extent.

Just for background development, in the case some people did not run into such commercials growing up I decided to try to search one of the archaic commercials. Personally, I still remember the extremely underweight children almost too frail to move being paraded on late night television all too well, as well as their distended bellies that are still the bud of many jokes once people do find out I am from there.

 I stumbled across across a few videos reminiscent of the many videos I had seen. All of the following videos in my opinion manipulate images to a great degree. In fact, one of the images that was included in one of the videos was the Kevin Carter's iconic images from his trip to Northern Sudan depicting the vulture preying over a famine stricken Sudanese toddler from the village of Ayod, Sudan.

In efforts to capture the perfect image whether it is for the purpose to represent the raw moment or to serve as call to action for the viewing public there is to an extent a degree of staging that occurs, which ultimately also equates manipulating the subject. In this instance the subject is the marginalized, the have-nots, the hungry, the sickly, and youth this leads to the question whether this equates to exploitation. When this images are captured we need to also weight out what we are able to live with in terms of at what cost does the image warrant the exploitation. Is the after affect or the desired call to attention worth it?

Another interesting aspect of the videos posted below is the lack of a call to action. We mentioned this in class earlier. The stirring up of all these emotions and sense of accomplishment felt by some for just engaging with the images and feeling like a better person for seeing the depths of poverty that exist. Yes, many of us need to be more grateful for what we have and it does become quiet simpler when you see the less fortunate shoved in your face on your big screen television. However, displaying such images whether they are staged, manipulated, and utter examples of exploitation are even WORSE to me when there is no option or suggestion to viewers to help fix the problem they are feeling sorry for and emotional over.  When we joke about things like #FirstWorldProblems I think we become cognizant of a problem, which is the goal, but are missing the latter half of the goal: the change we are hoping for.

Not too surprisingly, the images today asking for donations for Ethiopia are quite similar. The only representation of poverty that I felt was a stray away from these all too paralleling videos was a film shaped to feel like a documentary. The title, Zewdi The Street Kid, in my opinion does much more justice to the target group(marginalized street children in Ethiopia). http://vimeo.com/27882235

Michael B. Katz in relation to LIFEhabits

Yesterday in class we discussed the six problems of poverty that Michael B. Katz addressed in his essay “What kind of Problem is Poverty? The six different problems are: persons, places, resources, political economy, power, and markets. After a short discussion of how each different problem is important in its own way, the professor had us get into our groups to discuss how our group projects related to one or many of the six problems of poverty. My group’s project: Learning Important Fun Eating habits (LIFEhabits), will be focusing on looking at obesity rates in a school district and more specifically focusing on 8^th grade middle school students. Our goal is to educate students about the importance of eating healthy.

As we were discussing where our project’s goals would fit under, we came to a consensus that our project problem solution fell under resources. In Katz essay, his explanation of poverty based on resources focus a lot on money, and how poverty is the absence of money. In our case, our group felt that resources for us meant something more than money; it meant having the knowledge to understand what is happening, or why things are happening. The levels of obesity in middle schools might be the result of lack of education on nutrition. There is no real solution to this problem is all we do is give people money to try and change things without really analyzing the problem, and why it keeps happening. Like one of my classmates mentioned in class. It’s like giving homeless people money to go to the doctor, you re giving them the resource (money) but they will not go because they will either spend the money elsewhere or not be informed on where to go. The solution would be to taking them ourselves. Same thing will happen with middle school children and their schools. We can give them the money they need to change the lunch menu, but unless the students are aware of why it is best to eat healthy foods instead of Burgers and pizza every day, they will not eat during lunch, instead they will continue their eating habits outside school. Is all about knowledge. At least that is what many of us though as we started thinking about our projects.  But is it really? Professor Talwalker left us thinking about a question she wrote “is knowledge most likely conceived as a resource, or not?” on the board.

We also said that our project fell under people. The only solution will not only be informing students about the benefits of healthy eating habits, but also outreaching to them and trying to change their way of thinking. Many students do not like fruits and vegetables, and that is understandable because most of us went through that phase. But the only way to have these children change their way of thinking when it comes to choosing between healthy foods and junk food, is by motivating them and once again informing them about nutrition. At the end of the day this could be our biggest problem, having children understand.

Finally the third category in which our project falls under is places. For this category we are still debating whether it actually does fall under places or not. In class our group we had agreed that it did because where someone lives also affects their way of thinking, but after discussing as a class, our group said that maybe it did not because we were not focusing on a certain race, we wanted to apply our project to multiple school districts, wealthy or not, and finally we were not going to solve this problem by moving everyone out of their neighborhood. But when we presented our project to the class, a classmate and professor Talkwaker both mentioned that place might actually be a problem. Yet we are debating whether place is a solution to our problem.

Overall Katz essay was in my opinion a well-written essay that helped us start thinking about specific problems and solutions for our group projects that we are going to encounter along the way.