Printer-friendly versionThe opening scene of the 2004 film Yesterday shows a mother (named Yesterday) and her daughter Beauty, walking down a deserted South African road. The daughter, maybe 5 years old, is describing her desire to transform into a bird. Why? She wants to float over to their destination, relieving her little legs of the agony of this miles-long trek.
The finish line is a health clinic in a ramshackle hut. You see, Yesterday has developed this wretched, knock-you-over cough. But the line is lengthy, so they wait and wait until it’s announced that everyone else must return next Tuesday.
Next Tuesday? A once-a-week doctor? Yes.
Yesterday and Beauty tramp home. They repeat the journey, but again they are not early enough, not one of the chosen.
Weeks later, Yesterday meets the doctor, who asks her to read a consent form to draw blood. We realize that her patient cannot read or write. She draws the blood anyway and reveals the diagnosis.
HIV.
The film explores the world of a dusty village, of water drawn from a collective pump, of education as a commodity, of the ailing left to die without medicine or even shelter.
We have to show our students this world, our world. We have to thrust them outside of their narrow space. We have to provide opportunities for them to compare their own systems—educational, healthcare—with those in developing countries, to reach conclusions, to advocate for change. Films have the power to spark these conversations.
So do impassioned colleagues.
Sandy Sermos will not allow her students to ignore social injustice. For more than 30 years, Sandy has pushed middle school students to consider food distribution, to research issues surrounding water quality and access, to learn, to debate, to care.
“She constantly makes us feel like we can make a difference,” says eighth-grader, Marina. “Not all teachers can do that.”
Sandy’s enthusiasm for learning is contagious. If she told students to meet her at 3:40 a.m. on a Saturday to study some global issue, they would be there.
Last year, her students wrote first- and second-place essays in the national Philosophy Slam, which asked them to grapple with whether the “pen is mightier than the sword.” For the past two years, her students have been state champions in the Future Problem-Solvers competition.
In one week, Sandy will load a bus with 20 students and go to the Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Ark. There they will learn lessons about poverty as they simulate life in a developing country. For this “vacation,” students will not have their iPods, their warm blankets or their refrigerators. Instead, they will subsist on meager food--rice, vegetables and eggs.
Depending on the country where they “live,” the students may have, say, abundant water, but limited firewood. They will have to negotiate with other “villages” to exchange resources. Some rice for a sprinkling of water, perhaps? Then they will build a fire, cook their meal, and sleep (or lay awake) inside the likes of, say, a Zambian hut.
“You might not think about people who are hungry,” said David, another eighth-grader. “Or, if you do, you might think, ‘oh, that’s not so bad.’ But this trip will help us understand a little bit more of what they go through.”
Sandy’s students know that her worries about our planet run deep and that her expectations for them run high. She trains them to be thinkers because we need empathetic problem-solvers in our crippled world.
For Yesterday. For today.
And, of course, for tomorrow.
Baker is a middle school language arts teacher in Missouri.
Comments
Out of curiosity, and I hope
Out of curiosity, and I hope the question is not too impertinent, do any of these trips illustrating the dilemma of poverty examine one of the fundamental factors involved with raising people out of poverty, affordable access to energy? It is admirable to empathize with the trials of a family that consistently does not have enough to eat but it is more admirable to ameliorate the lacking that causes the lacking.
All of the energy in the
All of the energy in the world does not assist in matters of simple starvation, lack of medical care, lack of clean water and lack of a decent education.
The education assists in giving knowledge of disposal of human and household waste, something unknown in many areas of poverty in this world. Hence, the massive cholera epidemics that kill tens of thousands. The knowledge also teaches the importance of maintaining that clean water supply, again, preventing cholera.
Education teaches proper stewardship of one's land and means of irrigation, when it is possible.
Education creates a drive to seek MORE education, causing some to become health care providers and return to help their village.
I HAVE PERSONALLY been to Africa and the conditions are horrific. Dry, desert land, beyond arid all too frequently. Little rain comes until the monsoon season arrives. Water is underground, but any wells dug all too often become contaminated with human and animal waste. Irrigation IS possible, in limited fashion, to provide for the populace, but again, education is necessary to be able to wisely utilize the scarcest of commodities naturally available there, water.
It is a harsh continent, with few exceptions. All of the energy in the world STILL will not provide water or knowledge.
Ah, but you are seriously
Ah, but you are seriously mistaken, sir. Energy has everything to do with assisting in those matters by the simple expedient of changing time allocation. Without access to cheap and affordable energy, clothes are washed in a river or through muscle power, consuming time. Light and heat are provided by gathering burnable fuel, consuming time. Water is provided by muscle power and buckets, consuming time. Light ends with the fuel for the day, limiting time. All of these things, caused by lack of energy, force an impoverished person to expend almost all of their time simply to survive on the most basic level. There is no time to acquire knowledge, no time to till a bigger field, no time to work a couple more hours towards one labor-saving device or another, no time to see to the holistic education of the children. Lack of energy forces a destitute person to waste the most finite resource of all just to exist, allowing for no progress or improvement.
Contrast this, if you will, with someone who has cheap and affordable energy. An electric stove cooks their meals and an electric light illuminates their home, making it unnecessary to gather fuel that has the byproduct of filling their abode with smoke and aerosolized debris that damages their health. An electric washer washes the clothing while the person educates themselves or tills an extra row or spends a little extra time seeing to their child's education. A well with an electric motor brings water by doing nothing more than throwing a switch, water that comes from deep aquifers less prone to being contaminated. A pipe shot through with holes can irrigate the fields; at some point, maybe the village pools their resources and buys access to highly modern equipment that can till and harvest rapidly and without the expenditure of great time and effort. The day does not end when the sun goes down or the fuel runs out but when someone with access to cheap and abundant energy decides to turn the light off. Drudgery is relieved, health hazards avoided, and time freed up to pursue personal or familial betterment.
Cheap and abundant energy allows for this in a way that nothing else does. Westerners have little to no capacity to truly appreciate how much the simple fact of access to cheap and abundant energy makes a difference. The first world would not be the first world unless it had access to hydrocarbons and electricity and the third world is defined by how very little access it has to these twin sources of prosperity and plenty. Without the twin resources, there would be no cars, computers, roads, telephones, washing machines, tractors, electric well pumps, climate control, heart monitors, scanning electron microscopes, or any of the modern institutions critical to security of self served by the innumerable inventions that rely totally on hydrocarbons and electrical power. Again, the first world has these things and that is why it is the first world; the third world does not have these things and that is why it is the third world. It is no accident that as powers like China and India reach for security, status, and prosperity, they build power plants and buy oil.
I agree. Electricity is
I agree. Electricity is fundamental to the growth of third world countries, and the Heifer project does, in fact, address this need. Heifer International works to end poverty and hunger and improve the environment by providing communities in need (not just in third world countries, but in America in well- the US has the highest number of Heifer programs currently running) with animals and trees. Heifer teaches the community to care for and organize these animals, and allows the community to decide who gets what. It is not a program that requires constant "check-ins" on a community- it instead teaches a village to care for the life changing animals and trees that Heifer provides. These animals, including goats, cows, chickens, rabbits, water buffaloes, camels and llamas provide a community with seven basic things (the seven "m's"): milk, manure, money, materials, meat, muscle, and motivation. In addition, these resources can be turned into so much more. For example, one of the "villages" in Heifer consists of two Thai huts. Nearby the huts lays pig pen, with a concrete floor. Every day, a "villager" power-sprays the manure created by the pigs off into grates below the pen. The manure and water run off into a silo of sorts, and goes through a simple process which takes out the methane from the manure. This methane is then diverted to a gas oven, and presto, a family has energy. No wood, no kindling, simply a match. Programs like Heifer realize the need for electricity in third-world countries (and our own) and address it in unique and entrepreneurial ways, truly "killing two birds with one stone"- or in this case, seven.