Month: December 2017

Everyone relies on other people in their life, although some individuals might be reluctant to admit this reliance.  This reliance causes issues when the people you rely on fail to do what was expected of them. This is demonstrated in both the article “UN poverty official touring Alabama’s Black Belt: ‘I haven’t seen this’ in the First World” and through the texts we read during the semester. Continue reading “Reliance on Others”

This semester has been an extremely interesting and insightful one. I am currently enrolled in two courses with similar topics; this one and a sociology course titled “Gender and Science”. I signed up for both thinking that the topic names may have been a typo as there wasn’t a very long description for either of the courses. But, I signed up anyway because the title for this course, if it was correct, seemed intriguing and I had heard that Dr. McCoy as well as Dr. Eisenberg (who teaches the sociology course) were good professors. Continue reading “Gender/Race in Science and Medicine”

The Apocalypse is a subject that everyone has thought about or discussed with friends when trying to come up with something to do. The most common question asked is what would you do if the zombies came after us, which results in a bunch of speculation that was unlikely to happen. There are many quizzes across the internet that will help you figure out whether you would survive post-apocalypse, or anything that is wrought forth with it.  Along with the topic comes the inevitable talk of how its going to happen; will the world end by storm, fire, an outbreak of a disease that separates us into different groups?

Everyone likes to think that they would survive the apocalypse based on the movies or novels they have read. Either secluding themselves in a bunker hidden away from civilization that will keep them safe and occupied for years to come. Or going head first into battle with each other, or against the adversary that was made from the disease or outbreak that has caused the disarray. Most of the time when people think about the Apocalypse, they don’t always think of a weather disaster, there is one thing that comes to the forefront when thinking about the world ending and wanting to survive. And yes, I am talking about everyone’s favorite subject to discuss or avoid: Zombies.

Zombies have had a pivotal role in post-apocalyptic lore across the television. Everybody tries to make their own version of zombies so that their idea can seem original, but they are all seen as the same; slow moving, can be killed by decapitation or fire. From shows or movies such as Game of Thrones, to the Walking Dead, to World War Z, and I Am Legend. Even though none of the motion pictures state there are zombies in it, everyone who has watched them agrees. Even in Zone One there are two new subgroups of Zombies to add to the board of variety.

What classes a zombie as a zombie is the reanimation of a dead human or animal corpse. Everyone has a general sense of how to kill zombies and defeat them. Every show or book that wants to incorporate zombies comes up with their own way to defeat them, but they all tend to fall into the same category. For Game of Thrones, the White Walkers go around behind the wall, turning the dead into wights, extremely fast and strong people who can only be killed by fire or a special material; in the movie I Am Legend, we have a ‘cure’ for cancer that has gone wrong and is turning those infected into these strong creatures (darkseekers) that can’t handle daylight and actually die when exposed to UV light; in World War Z, the zombies can be destroyed by head shots, or the complete destruction of the head; in the Walking Dead, the zombies, or a variety of zombies, with different names for the type they are, and can only be killed by destroying the brain. And recently in Zone One, we have two groups of zombies; one that moves fast and is active in trying to kill you, or one that sits there and doesn’t do very much, and the only way to kill them would be to shoot them in the head, or death by decapitation.

Poverty is the state of being poor or the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount

Throughout the semester, all of the novels and articles that we’ve discussed relate to poverty. The article and novel that I felt correlated with poverty the most were “Hookworm, a disease of extreme poverty, is thriving in the US south. Why?” written by Ed Pilkington and Zulus by Percival Everett. Zulus and the Hookworm article both dealt with negative biological affects on people and poverty.

Zulus dealt with the life of a women, Alice Achitophel, who becomes impregnated by a rapist and has to deal with the environmental tragedies of a nuclear disaster. Alice is the last women on earth who is pregnant which is an issue for the apocalyptic time period during the novel. The only food available is cheese because everything else is contaminated. Of course, pregnant women happen to eat more than the average person because they’re eating for two persons. Her being pregnant causes issues with the distribution of food because it’s already an issue that there is barely enough food for everyone. When there’s a person who is obese and pregnant, that causes an imbalance in the fact that 1 person is getting an advantage.

Hookworm is a disease that “enters the body through the skin, usually through the soles of bare feet, and travels around the body until it attaches itself to the small intestine where it proceeds to suck the blood of its host.” This parasite conquers the amount of food that you admit in to your system which then “causes iron deficiency and anemia, weight loss, tiredness and impaired mental function.” If you’re already dealing with poverty and struggling to get food for survival that has nutritional values, a disease like this takes more of toll on you.

In comparison to Zulus where poverty is already affected by a greater cause , the impoverished areas in the United States where hookworm is popularly contaminated with, is dealing with poverty due to similar reasoning. According to the article “Causes of poverty in America”, those reasons are poor economy, lack of affordable housing, drug use, lack of education and medical expenses. The issues with both situations are that the people are lacking resources.

Here in the United States, one of the states that have been affected the most by hookworm is Alabama.The people affected by hookworm in Alabama lack resources in that poverty is a large factor. If you are poor, you can’t afford a $15,000 septic tank to filter the water coming in from the terrain under your home.  According to “Hook worm infections and Sanitation Failures Plague Rural Alabama” only “half  the households with septic have a failing system, or worse, no means of waste disposal at all besides a pipe directed at the backyard.”

This is sad because people are trying to maintain their resources and fix the issue but they all cannot afford to do so. Similarly in Zulus, Alice’s secret of being pregnant was held by people who were trying to deal with the same issues, which is to go back to their normal lives and survive normally.

“Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.”

–Eli Khamarov

–So is an unwanted disease.–

Just like many other undergraduates, my academic career did not go without some unexpected twists and turns. Despite the stereotypes surrounding Asian American parenting (which I must say, are often true), my parents never steered me towards any specific subject during my early and later childhoods. By leaving me with the impression that they completely trusted whatever decision I made, I have always set high expectations for myself in response to that trust. In doing so, I placed myself in my own self-constructed cycle of constant apprehension and satisfaction without any proper guidance, like a rickety hamster wheel.

Unfortunately, the huge imbalance between the secondary education and the college education systems in North America almost threw me off. Even with a specialized high school education from the city, I was not prepared to enter college as a pre-med Biology major. And yet, here I am in my junior year as a pre-med English Literature major with a Biology minor and the beginnings of feeling like I am on the right track. However, do not be mistaken that I regret entering SUNY Geneseo as a Biology major. In fact, I definitely would not have gotten here without the two subjects clashing together. Continue reading “My Happy Place”

A few weeks ago I attended a panel called Trans? Fine By Me!, which talked about the everyday struggles the transgender community at Geneseo faces, and it was held in light of the offensive comments that were made by a professor earlier in the semester. Hearing a number of Geneseo students and faculty members speak about their experience on campus was eye opening, and involved a lot of critical thinking internally, one of the learning outcomes which we have been talking about in this course.

I thought I would share a few things from the panel with you all, and talk about how it made me feel. One example that stuck out to me from the panel was a Geneseo faculty member talking about the same sex bathrooms on campus. m. It turns out that Geneseo just turned mens restrooms into gender neutral bathrooms. That being said, they basically just changed the sign outside the bathroom and left the inside the same. I never really gave this much thought, but the student talked about how it makes the members of the transgender community feel as if it is still just a men’s bathroom and makes them feel like outcast. Another example was a student was talking about telling his professor that he had a sex change, and what it led to. After telling him, the professor was calling him a her every once and awhile, and would then correct their self by saying the proper pronouns. The student then elaborated and said how he would have prefered it if the professor would just call him by his name, instead of he or her. This would keep him  from being embarrassed when the professor corrected himself by saying “her, I mean him”. This student also mentioned how when something like this happens, he would go home and feel so upset by it that he could not even focus on doing hours of homework and studying, clearly showing that these every struggles have a major affect on their lives.

Upon hearing these two examples among several others at the panel, I began thinking. I thought about how I never really thought that transgender men and women faced such difficulties, and that I truthfully never paid much attention to that subject. This is an example of thinking critically by evaluating the assumptions underlying the claims of self and others. Up until this panel, I had an assumption made in my mind by myself on the struggles of the transgender community at my own college that was clearly a false and understated one. However, after hearing and visualizing how difficult these problems really are, I was able to come to a reasonable conclusions on the basis of evidence provided during the panel that I need to be more aware of the struggles my own schoolmates face and raise awareness among others to try and help make these problems decrease in occurrence.

I found out after I wrote this that this blog post is actually not meant for our class, but I still think the content can be related back to what our class discusses. The topic of the blog post was the fact that people who tend to read more are able to be more empathetic and sympathetic than those who don’t due to their ability to put themselves in the shoes of the characters in the stories that they read. I thought this was especially interesting in the context of us reading Zone One. Continue reading “Are We Really The Victims?”

I just posted about medical voluntourism, but it is a topic that I feel strongly about so I thought I would share some of my thoughts from the class discussion on finding a solution to the problem. Two major problems that I am going to focus on are: people are attending this trips for the wrong reasons, and people going in with hopes in accomplishing much more than they are capable or trained to do. I came up with a few ways to ensure that a higher number of people are going into these third world countries with a better mindset and for the right reasons.

Like I mentioned in the previous paragraph, there are many people that attend these trips with the wrong intentions. One possible solution would be to create a more strict process that candidates would have to complete before being chosen to attend a medical voluntourism trip. For example, implementing a research paper on the culture of the country of the trip would create a way for students to become more culturally aware before stepping into communities. I remember talking in group discussion in class about how in some countries eating with your right hand is considered unsanitary. That is just one example of how a research paper would both narrow down the number of candidates who may attend for the wrong reasons since there is a work load in the application, and educate those attending on how to act and diversify in their culture.

The other topic I mentioned was how groups will often go into these communities in third world countries with the “savior” mindset, or hopes to accomplish more than possible or allowing unqualified students give medical treatment. For example, we talked in this course about how students, college-aged, are delivering babies on these voluntourism trips. This is clearly a huge problem that should not be allowed, and possible solution for this would be to put a policy in place for all organizations that run medical voluntourism trips. To elaborate, if there were a policy in place that provided strict guidelines for what these groups were and weren’t allowed to do, that must be followed by all medical voluntourism groups, that could help prevent things like unqualified students delivering babies from occurring. Whether it be something put in place by the United States government or whomever it may be, a policy with punishment such as termination in that group or organization from holding future trips, seems like a viable solution.

 

In one of our first group discussions, Sunita brought up an article which talked about taking precaution in taking pictures and watching what you post from a volunteerism trip, which relates to our class discussion on them. After reading her post on this, I did some research and found another article by Pacific Standard Magazine called #InstagrammingAfrica. This article is similar to the one Sunita used, but it has some new information in it and I want to voice some additional things as well.

The main thing that I would like to point out is how social-media is often a place where people put up a fake curtain or wall of what they want people to see and how they want to be viewed by others. This is clearly a problem with medical voluntourism. The article jokingly states “a six-day visit to a rural African village can completely change a woman’s Facebook profile picture” and “I don’t think my profile photo will ever be the same, not after the experience of taking such incredible pictures with my arms around those small African children’s shoulders”. While these quotes are clearly jokes, they are actually exposing why many people go on these trips. I believe that there are too many people that go on these trips for the wrong reasons.

I am a freelance photographer, and often have a camera in hand during my free time. One thing I believe whole heartedly in is capturing moments as they happen, not making them. While this may seem somewhat unrelated, let me explain. I always focus on what is happening around me, the people I’m with and what I am experiencing, and never try and let the camera get in the way of enjoying that moment. If you apply this to people on voluntourism trips, some people are on these trips to make those moments. Instead of just being present with the communities they are visiting and trying to make an impact in their lives, they are also making sure they snap a selfie with a few children in the village to post on instagram. In the article, author Lauren Kascak says this of an experience taking a photo while on a trip, “I’m beaming in the photograph, half towering and half hovering over these children. I do not know their names, they do not know my name, but I directed a friend to capture this moment with my own camera. Why?”. This question really stuck out to me, and I think more people need to stop and ask themselves, “why?”. In Laurens case, there was no need to take a picture with two strangers. Now, if they had been sick while she was there and she was taking care of them throughout the trip while they returned to health, that would be a moment worth capturing. I’m not trying to say not to take any sort of pictures at all, but what I am trying to say is to not let the camera get in the way of why you are really there.

 

 

I see that many of us have been reflecting on the collective course statement as well as the class as a whole, so I thought I might jot my thoughts down as well.

This semester, I have been involved in more group assignments and projects than I ever have. Just prior to the first days of this class, the word “group work” could bring me to tears. I’m practically the poster child for introverts. I don’t know why I am. My mind is constantly bustling with ideas and thoughts that I feel could make a difference, but I am too afraid to speak on them.

Continue reading “Growing.”