My Reaction to the UNICEF Photo Essays

these unicef photo essays really made me think about how privlilged i am to have a house, food, and and a good education. it could have just as easily been me that was born to a poverty stricken family in the middle of the Sudan, in the Drafur genocide, but it wasn't. any of these abused and deprived children could have just as easliy been born in my place, and they could have probably made good use of their position. it really does make me sad to think about how we worry about how people will percieve us, our how good a grade we are going to get on our next math investigation, when kids, even in this country are instead worrying about how they will get food, our if certain members of their families will survive if they don't get proper medical teatment. These are things that most of us never eevn give a single thought to.

Street Child In Role Activity

i thought that the exercise that we did today in class, was very useful in helping me to develope my character. Part of this is because you were able to sort of, in a way, experiance what a day in the life of an average street child would be, and you did not have to rely on research and statistics and such to help you understand your cahracter.

street child experience

in the other class on tuesday we presented our monolougue on street children. now today we did an exerscie on street children and our character on how you would live in the streets. it was because all the girls in this exercie were helping others and establishing relationships and giving there stuff away. while all the boys were nicking stuff and posestions and have fights they also drug runs and pickpocketing incidents. when we played this game it seemed very realstic and it put you in there shoes and you feel as if it is real and once it gets queiter you realize how lucky you are that you arent in that position and that wat would happen if you were. it feels really fun to prentend to do this and that it is a really good exersice to do and it make you look in the future.

Street child role play

The exercise was difficult for me. One of the reasons it was difficult was because it was occationally hard to stay in character because I would be talking to someone and the conversations would start and one of us would laugh and then it was really hard to stay in character. Also it helped doing the monologue right before hand because my character was still in my mind but i realized that my monologue character was slightly unrealistic because she was so happy and so optomistic and that the other people took advantage of the because I was stolen from twice. Once when I was awake and once when i was sleeping. Also I had to be tougher and because I acted young alot of people tried to take care of me like Shelby and Margalit which was interesting.

Trust Exercise

In case I didn't write a blog about the trust exercise before, I am writing about it now. The trust exercise was actually not that worrying because I trusted the people I was working with and the trust activities were not dangerous. For the first trust exercise, we led people around the room using signals. The person you were guiding was not allowed to open their eyes and they relied on their partner to not let them run into anything. The second activity was more difficult. We worked in groups of three. The three people in a group made a row and walked around the room together in that order. The person standing in between the two other people would just fall at any point and their partners were responsible for catching them before they hit the ground. Overall, no one got injured although a couple of people were dropped by their partners.

In Role

Today we did an exercise where we all had to play the role of our person that we talked about in our monologue. Everyone seemed to be really pro-active where as my character was quieter. I really enjoyed doing this exercise because i felt like i knew a lot about my character and i played my character the way i presented her in my monologue. Some people came up with a completelynew character and played the role of someone that we never heard about in the monologue. I was surprise that everyone stayed in their role. I thought everyone would be laughing and just being themselves instead of playing the character that they were meant to. I enjoyed doing this exercise and i would do it again. I also think it helped that we did the monologue before having to play our character while interacting with other people.

Why do street children get involved in drug trafficking drugs, prostitution or rape?

Of course people can find many different ways to definate why children get involved in drugs and/or prostitution. But my thought of why children get involved with drugs and/or prostitution or rape is because they might not have a wll paying source of money wich is the main reason of involvement. Children usually deal lower class drugs and answer to adult of the community who can even be workind for the government (ex. police officers). Usually these things are not done by children on their own because normally nobody would sell great amounts of drugs to children. And no street child would have the amount of money to actually get a decent amount of drugs. The adults do the purchasing stage and leave it up to the teenagers to sell the drugs and earn the money for them. The teenagers and children obviously do not get payed much (ex. the probaly get 5-10% of what they earn). Selling drugs on the street can cause close friendships and create small gangs which later enlarge to become drug kingpins. This can cause violence, murder arrest and many other things.

Another illegal activity street children get involved in is prostitution. Prostitution also is a like a food chain. There are people who all the prostitues come and answer to who probably give a cut to their leaders. Prostitutes earn more money then drug dealing chlidren. But during this job many diseases can be spread because of unsafe sex. Also sometimes prostitutes are ripped off by people and they can een get killed because of resisting to leave the client without pay. I think prostitution pays more than drug dealing but it is a more dangerous job.

By Yusif