Catching Fire

I'm still reading the second hunger games book "Catching Fire". The basic plot of the book is that Katniss has recently won the hunger games with her "boyfriend" Peeta. She thinks life will go back to usual, but it never will. The president Snow tells Katniss that she will start another uprising against the capitol with what she did in the arena because there is always one victor in the Hunger games but Her and peeta were gonna eat poisonous fruit and die so no one won because they refused to fight each other, so they let them both win. This has shown rebellion in that is basically says "The capitol does not own me". The president tells her that he will kill her friends and family unless she shows the nation that she is loyal to the capitol. But it doesn't work out, behind her back people rebel and she is their leader, her mocking jay pin is the symbol. One by one the capitol hurts her best friend, and her friend Cinna. An uprising in district 8 occurs. As punishment the president sends the most recent victors of all the hunger games back in.

That's what i read so far. The issue of government and anarchy come up allot. Her government is evil, anyone who goes up against them is secretly killed, they force people to work in the districts for low wages and unsafe conditions. As Katniss likes to say "District 12 where you can starve in safety." The hunger games itself was created as a punishment of 75 years ago when the district rebelled against Panem's capitol because of it's unfair so called "democracy", instead of listening to what their people have to say they decide to bomb district 13 to nothing and create the hunger games. citzens feel that they should rather have control of their own district then being controled by this force of evil.

Social Awareness (LATE)

I'm doing my picture book on Cancer. I got into this topic by Sako and the 1,000 Paper Cranes it's a book about a girl in the 50's in Japan. It's been about 10 years after the bombing in Japan. Sako is an up beat and active little girl who joins a race at her school, she begins to feel strange and something heavey on her chestm She is taken to a hospital and it turns out she got radioactive poisinig from the bombing which means she has cancer. Her friend tells her that if you make 1,000 paper crnes the gods will grant you health. Sako ends at 600 before she dies in her bed with her family around her. I cried for too long, still writing this i'm crying (for real).  Felt that now i needed to write a book on having cancer. This topic is too importnat for me to ignore.

Blankets

I finished re-reading one of my favorite books of all time. "Blankets" by Craig Thomson. I don't want to give too much away so here's a summary. Craig, his little brother Phil, mother and father live in a small farm town in Wisconsin. They are poor but get by, Craig is very religious just like his father and deeply believes in God. At school he is bullied by the other boy because of his social class and the way he looks. He feels like a failure to God because he doesn't look after his brother even when he gets into a dangerous situation, he doesn't do well in school, he's not strong or athletic or social. His only gift is he is a natural born artist. When Craig is 17he goes to a Church winter camp for a week during his three week winter break, this is where he meets the love of his life Raina. For two weeks and gets a window into Raina's stressful life. When he has to go he never see's Raina again.

This book has some really interesting themes one of them is religion. During the book Craig goes through a religious war with in. hen he is young his parents drill religion in his head, they make him believe that god is the lord of the universe, that there is only one god, that Jesus s the son of god and died for our sin. He takes this very seriously, he even burns all his drawings claiming that they took away from his Bible studies. But when he meets Raina they talk about God, Raina doesn't believe in Heaven or Hell, she doesn't believe in Adam and Eve, and once Craig leaves his house and goes to new york city he realizes he doesn't believe at all, he realizes the bible doesn't make since and that people like his mother depended to much on made up stories, don't get me wrong Jesus was real, Joseph was real and some other biblical prophets were real people but lost there real meaning in exaggeration, to the point where the myth and truth merged into the same thing.

Catching fire Thesis

thesis: in [Catching Fire] the goverment there is a lot like the goverment in many diffrent nations we have today. They try to cover up to the public serious problems that could concern them and anyone who tries to speak out will die.

Article 2 on child labor

SHANGHAI — China said Wednesday that it was investigating whether hundreds or perhaps thousands of children from poor areas in the southwest part of the country had been sold to work as slave laborers* in booming coastal factory cities.

Authorities in southern Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong, said they had already rescued more than 100 children from factories in Dongguan*, a huge manufacturing city known for producing and exporting toys, textiles and electronics.

The children, mostly 13 to 15 years old*, were often tricked or kidnapped* by employment agencies working in an impoverished part of western Sichuan Province, and then sent to factory towns in Guangdong, where they were often forced to work as much as 300 hours a month for little money*, according to government officials and accounts from the state-owned media.

The authorities in southern China said Wednesday that they had arrested several people involved in the case and that they were trying to determine the identities of the children.

"These youngsters have no ID cards, so it makes it difficult to identify them," said Zhang Xiang, a spokesman for the Guangdong Labor Bureau. The child labor scandal was uncovered by Southern Metropolis Daily, a crusading newspaper based in Guangzhou, in southern China, less than a year after the authorities said they had rescued hundreds of people, including children, from working as "slave laborers" in brick kilns in the north and central part of the country.

Many of the workers in that case also said they had been kidnapped.*

The new child labor case "is quite typical," said Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics and social policy at the Beijing Institute of Technology. "China's economy is developing at a fascinating speed, but often at the expense of laws, human rights and environmental protection."

Professor Hu said that although Beijing had pushed to improve labor conditions throughout the nation, local governments were still driven by incentives to make their economies grow, so they tried to lure cheap labor. "Most of the work force comes from underdeveloped or poverty-stricken areas," he said. "Some children are even sold by their parents, who often don't have any idea of the working conditions."

The child labor cases are an embarrassment to the Chinese government*, which has in recent years announced a series of nationwide crackdowns on child labor and labor law violations.

But experts say rising labor, energy and raw-material costs, and labor shortages in some parts of southern China, have caused some factory owners to cut costs or find new sources of cheap labor, including child labor.

Even factories that supply global companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, have been accused in recent years of using child labor, and violating local labor laws. Big corporations have stepped up their factory audits, but suppliers are sometimes adept are hiding operations and workers from auditors.

Officials in Dongguan say they are now investigating all factories in the area to determine whether any are employing children. Young people can legally go to work in factories when they turn 16.

In a series of articles this week, journalists working for Southern Metropolis Daily wrote that they had traveled to Liangshan, a prefecture in Sichuan Province, to pose as recruiters and to interview parents and other residents.

The newspaper said recruiters and labor agencies working in Liangshan often transported children south and then "sold" them to factories at virtual auctions in Guangdong Province, one of China's biggest manufacturing centers and home to a huge population of migrant workers.

At some coastal factories, children were even lined up and selected based on their body type, the journalists wrote.

The newspaper also alleged that when the children were paid, they received about three renminbi per hour, or about 43 cents, far below the local minimum wage, about 64 cents an hour. By law, overtime pay is much higher.*

Chen Fulin, a government spokesman in Liangshan, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the articles on child labor in Southern Metropolis Daily were correct.

"So far, we have detected and found four people in Zhaojue County suspected of luring the youngsters from Liangshan to Dongguan and forcing them to work in factories," he said. "We are dealing with the illegal employment agencies and the labor dealers, according to the law." In its report, Southern Metropolis Daily said some children had been threatened with death if they tried to escape from labor recruiters.

The newspaper did not identify the coastal factories where the children worked, but the report said that one was a toy factory in Dongguan, and that it had not been hard for the journalists to uncover the labor scandal.

"Since journalists could discover the facts by secret interviews in a few days," Southern Metropolis Daily wrote in a separate editorial on Tuesday, "how could the labor departments show no interest in it and turn aside from it for such a long time?"

* Sold? a job is a job you can quit and the company dosen't own you. This is slavery. You can not buy humans.

* Only 100. there are 250 million children affected and only 100 saved. they need to step up there game because this is illegal and yet the whole world knows.

* 13 to 15. it's like kids my age working from dawn till dusk. It's horrible and scary.

* 300 hours a month. We go to school about 180 hours a month. probably less do to weekends and breaks. This is outrageous.

* Kidnapping!!!??? i thought that people sold there children but they kidnap them and force them to work! this is dead on slavery.

* It is emmbarssing. The whole world knows where most of our products are from. It's from children working like slaves no being slaves. It's not some secret.

* thay are paid 43 or 64 cents. I can buy a box of lemon heads at the deli with that i can buy a lolli pop or a jolly rancher with the amount of money they make per day. It's just depressing. 

Article 1 on child labor

Child Labor

Author And Page Information

• by Anup Shah
• This Page Last Updated Monday, January 01, 2001

• This page:http://www.globalissues.org/article/62/child-labor.
• To print all information e.g. expanded side notes, shows alternative links, use the print version:
  • http://www.globalissues.org/print/article/62

Child labor is not an easy issue to resolve; while it seems noble to immediately withdraw investments and cooperation with firms and factories that employ child labor it may do more harm than good. Many of these children are from very poor families and work to pay for their family and/or their education*. Depriving them of this income has led to some children seeking different, lower paid work, and even prostitution in some cases*. Other ways with schemes to help children would likely be needed so that this labor can be phased out. The same has been suggested by the International Labor Organization (ILO), at a meeting in Mexico City in 1999, who also pointed out that child labor affects over 250 million children*, 30 percent of which are in Latin America. A gradual phase out is said to be a more preferable solution.

According to the UK Committee for UNICEF, poverty is the most common factor contributing to child labor. In addition, "debt, bloated military budgets and structural adjustment programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have eroded the capacity of many governments to provide education and services for children*, and have also pushed up prices for basic necessities". (For more information on these aspects, also see this site's section on causes of poverty and the harmful structural adjustment policies.)

According to UNICEF, Somalia and USA are the only two countries in the world that havenot ratified the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child. The convention is the world's most widely ratified treaty. (USA have signed it, but Somalia has neither signed, nor ratified it, at the time I write this -- and Somalia doesn't currently have an internationally recognized government, which is why they cannot ratify the convention. The US have no such excuse.)

A huge movement called the Global March Against Child Labor, (which didn't get much media coverage in the USA), was an important event with marches in many major cities around the world drawing global attention towards the most heinous human rights violation: child labor and child slavery. The six-month long intercontinental March took off from Philippines in mid-January 1998, culminating in Geneva to coincide with the Debate Session of the International Labor Organization (ILO) on the Draft Convention on Child Right.

To find out more about children with regards to trade, labor, rights etc. the following may be helpful:

• Save the Children Fund UK and their section on child labor
• The Global March web site. They also have a link to other websites that are supporting the movement.
• Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund. In particular:
  • The Convention on the Rights of the Child.
  • State of the World's Children annual publications examines key issues about children.
  • A report on the State of the World's Children, 1997 focused on Child Labor, for example
• Casa Alianza, a South American-based group helping street kids.
• OneWorld Guides to:
  • Child Rights and the section on war.
  • Child Labor.
• Boes.org is a site devoted to child rights

* It's pretty sad that families do not have much of choice. they know what they are doing, they know it's wrong but they need money and it's one of the few options they have.

*Prostiution? I feel like it draws the line. No one can have the heart to sell there children into sexual slavery. But some people do and that makes my stomach turn.

* 250 million is too big for the number of child workers. It hurts that companies don't give a damn about anything except expanding profits.

* It's to sad that countries have to cut ediucation. It's such an important factor, what will happen here if no one learns anything? nothing will get done, we will resort back to a dark age.

2 person social issue poem (indivual)

THE LIFE WE LIVE IN IS NOT ALWAYS FAIR
My mother grounded me all week, I’m going to miss the party this weekend. I hate her.

My mother flung me down the stairs this morning, it’s the second time this week.

SOMETIMES I WANT TO LET GO OF IT
She’s horribly mean, she always sits me down for those endless hours about why I should call her when I leave school. It’s so annoying. I can hardly stand it. It’s like she hates me. 

And when I come home from school it’s the same routine, clean the kitchen, take out the trash, do the laundry, make dinner, clean up dinner, fold and put away the laundry and by 11:00 do my homework and at 2:00 am go to sleep. If I’m one minute late it’s a slap in the face and no dinner. To please her is an impossible task I feel like I can’t do much longer.


THE AFTERMATH
Is the worst part, the glares, the remarks makes me want to hide and cry. This woman? My mother? Hard to believe.

The sore feeling you get afterwards, your cheeks red from the smack, sore muscles, the stress, and the vomit. I’m scared, I’m sick of the hell in which day by day suffer in. Do other people feel this? I doubt it.

BUT I HOLD MY HEAD UP

There are the times she loves me, the times she hugs me when I get home from school, “how was your day, sweetie?” makes my entire day. I love her no matter what she says.

To remember the time she once loved me makes me smile, it’s in my heart and my memories, her cold looks of hate and her smacks of pain are bad but I know maybe down in her heart there is a tiny spark of love for me which maybe one day will grow, but for now I play by her rules.
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I wrote my indivual poem on child abuse. It's a 2 person thing about one of them is slightly neglected by his or her mother. They do not have the best mother in the world but they are uterly angry about, feeling as though they are slowly slipping out the grasp of there mother's unconditional love. It hurts them and brings the pain. They can't deal with it but they learn to look at bright side of things and to remember that she will always love her.

The other person is an abused child. Her/his mother is on the brink of evil and insanity. the child is abused phisicaly and constantly. He/she is starved and tourmented. There were times she could recall when her mother was sweet and loving which is long gone that keeps her/him alive. To keep her/him still alive she pertends that her/his mother still loves them.

Both children are hurt by there parents. Some rarley and others regularly.