martes, 7 de abril de 2015

CHILD SOLDIERS: REACHING OUR COMMUNITY

RAISING AWARENESS IN OUR SCHOOL AND SPREADING THE MESSAGE TO OUR COMMUNITY 

By Irene Cáceres, Raquel García, Romina La Paz and Thalía Peña.

WHAT HAVE WE DONE?

This was an activity that was done during the last week of March by our team members. We searched for information about children who are involved in conflicts in different countries. 

We found out that children can be recruited when they are about 10 years old, and form part of an armed group, or they can also work as cooks, spies, messengers, bodyguards, etc. 


Nowadays there are between 250.000 and 300.000 children fighting in the world.

After our research was done,  we designed  a big poster where we put some information about  child  soldiers and after that, we decided to make it more visible and took it to the town centre. 
We showed it to people who were walking in the street, we asked them their opinion about this issue and we shared our views with people from China, Germany, Great Britain, Italy,...

WHERE DID WE GO?

We went to The Concepción Church, near a popular pedestrian street located in La Laguna and we put the poster on the floor to show people the suffering of these children. There are some cafeterias  around  and it is a busy area with a lot of tourists, and local people.

WHY HAVE WE DONE IT?

We did this project because we are worried about this problem and we want people to  reflect about what is happening in other countries: many children are being used as suicide bombers, as sex slaves, or trained as killers from very young. 

They are not enjoying their infancy, and this is not fair. We wanted to make this visible to the people in our surroundings.

HOW DID WE PREPARE IT?

We used our “ATU” classes to work in it. Our teacher, Dácil Melián Huguet  helped us, and also we used some of our free time.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED FROM THIS EXPERIENCE?

We learned a lot from this project. We  were impressed to find out that many countries are using children as soldiers. Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Mali, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Mali, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen

They are used in many different ways, not always holding guns, but their human rights are constantly being violated. 

Furthermore, we got people to know about child soldiers and some of them gave us their impressions. They wrote their opinions in our poster.

We met people from  our islands and also from different countries that were visiting our city. 


Now, we have put our poster in our High School entrance hall, so that all the students and visitors can see it!

Here is the video we recorded of our experience!






1 comentario:

  1. I think we did a very useful work that day. We showed to some people a real situation that is happening in many countries around the world, and they shared their discomfort with us. When we asked them, many persons wanted to participate and write their opinion in our cardboards... Later, after reading all the comments, we realised that the people really worries about the mundial situation, they want that to change.

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