(Im)Possibilities

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.”

In one of my last couple of blog posts, I discussed the topic of implied consent in the context of DUIs. Essentially, if you deny a breathalyzer test, you may not be charged with a DUI, but your driver’s license can be suspended for 6-months and you may be fined $500. However, implied consent refers to more than just potential cases of DUIs. In many cases, especially when emergency health services are called upon, this type of consent is relevant. If the patient is unconscious or unresponsive, medical professionals will typically take all measures to ensure the patient survives with or without his or her consent.

Continue reading “Do Not Resuscitate: a Follow-Up to Implied Consent”

In Genna’s Recent blog post, which can be found here, she gave several good thoughts on the collaborative project. She started her article by referring to the article we looked at in the beginning of the semester, and within the article is said “all college student should have education experiences that teach them how to solve problems with people whose views are different from their own”. Going off of this quote from the article in Genna’s post, I agree with her when she said that this final collaborative project provides a great example of the quote, and I wanted to share a little bit from a Cultivating Community Event I went to a few weeks ago that relates to our project as well.

Cultivating Community is an event in which group discussion was held on “bubbles”, which essentially are known as identity markers, and how to merge those bubbles or identities to accomplish a task. In the group discussion, one thing that way brought up was that people have the language skills to communicate good and thoughtful information, but they don’t have the power to communicate what they are feeling. This relates to our collaborative final project in the aspect of giving people the power to say what they are feeling. In the first group session in this class, the discussion was solid, but they have improved greatly since then. There are many more people contributing in groups, bouncing off of each others ideas. Another reason why people are communicating more is because we all feel for the subjects and have opinions on them. In the cultivating community group discussion, we also talked about how a person has to experience or feel something to produce language. If you look at this course, we all felt something when reading the horrific encounters described in “Fourtune’s Bones” and “Medical Apartheid”, which gives us a voice to exclaim in group discussion. Lastly, we talked about how awareness of these differences in identities and beliefs leads to change. I know personally this project has shown me how to respect and value what other people have to say. I have heard insightful things in every group discussion that has helped be learn to do it. As you can see, there are several ways in which Cultivating Community can be related to both our journey in this course as well as our final collaborative project.