This week’s lesson for Bead for Life was another good one with lots of students joining us for lunch. We were able to talk about what it is like to live in extreme poverty on about $1 a day, which about one out of four people on the planet live on. Each of the students was given different amounts of money to spend at booths we had set up for purchases they could make. Booths represented choices like food, water, health care, heating, education, and luxury items (one of the luxury items was a mattress).
The majority of the students were very poor and only able to afford the poorest food and water, and maybe health care or education. Not much.
The middle class students represented people like the ladies in the Bead for Life program, who have worked themselves out of poverty and are able to enjoy a better quality of life.
One of the things I got to emphasize was that often the choices people have to make are very difficult. Some of the students chose some of the free things like water that had to be carried and was untreated. We talked about the fact that although this didn’t cost any money, it did cost in other ways, including poor health, time, and energy. We also talked about how having to take time to carry water or gather firewood kept people in poverty because they didn’t have time to go to school or look for work; they were too busy just trying to survive.
These lessons have been very impactful to my students who continue to have lots of meaningful and thoughtful things to say about what we are learning.
And we continued to talk about KONY 2012 and the controversy surrounding it.
If you haven’t watched the video yet you might want to check it out here.
No comments:
Post a Comment