Documentary: Born Into Brothels

It is sad to see such poverty, such suffering, such society issues when we have almost none of them here where we live and its even sadder to see how they cherish what we may consider as "nothing" but for them is everything they have. It is also sad to see that the women are the one who suffer the most as they are the ones who end up prostituting themselves maybe to get a couple of dollars to maybe buy a small sack of rice, how the children get treated as stray dogs by their own mother. This documentary touched me very deeply even though I am very aware that people in India are living in the equivalent to Hell, is sad to know that most of the kids who got help from their teacher ended up leaving school but at least she tried to help them just like I would have done and would like to do if I ever get the chance to do so.

There should be something done and what Zana did for them I consider it a marvelous work that more people with the necessary resources should copy and should help the good people that need their help.

I know that if I ever get the chance to help out people in need I would gladly do it.

My view of literature have not changed much as I as an individual don't like to read much, this has nothing to with the way Professor Betty Medina presented the class, is just that I was never raised as a book worm and that is why I personally don't like to read, don't take me wrong I do read, I read about medicine, technology, art, history and music but I'm not the kind of person to sit on a chair and read a book from head to toes in a day or a week I simply find that boring, but of course the professor gave us some interesting stuff to read, I definitely learned about the caste system in India which I had no knowledge of, I learned that there are some terrible problems in Africa with the female circumcision, this class also helped me to think a little more when it comes to writing and analyzing literary works.

Since there was a HUGE problem in this class I would like to present it through this last entry in the blog, the professor was one hell of a professor she was kind and I personally never felt that I was in the presence of a higher authority which I loved about this class and I always feel that in other classes, this was a great experience for me, she was easy going and a great help in everything we as students asked her, but the problem in the class were us,  the students as it was a rare occasion when we would do our assigned homework or read the stories which Betty Medina assigned for us, the problem in this class was not the teacher but us, our irresponsibility as students. I know that Professor Betty Medina felt a great frustration because one could notice it, I mean I would have felt it too.

Today was the first day of the last week of class and there were only 5 students present including me, we had to do our oral presentation and nobody showed up. I would like to take the time to say that I'm sorry for that and I speak for myself, this in no way includes the opinion of my other classmates, but I feel that we were super irresponsible towards our English class.

Thanks Professor.

My favorite piece of literature has now turned out to be the poem "I found it" by Fadwa Tuqan since it tell us how one can truly found oneself, how beautiful life can be comparing it with nature which has no comparison with anything else in the world when it comes to beauty. I love how she portrays her life as a strong bough from a tree since I believe trees are the first most important living things in the world, they are the ones that give us oxygen after all and I too believe my life is like a tree, I mean I love nature and if it was for me I would live in the Tibet with the monks defending mother earth and helping our mother's creatures. I feel identified with this piece of literature because of what I mentioned earlier, I think it's a beautiful piece or literature because of the way the author expresses her feelings and her life through nature. Life is a wonderful and beautiful thing and I think she portrayed it as such, elegantly, with such passion and devotion which I think I wouldn't have done it any other way. Life and nature both are beautiful things that need to be respected by all living beings.

I Stand Here Ironing by Tilli Olsen

We can see here the classic mother oppressed by personal and environmental circumstances that laments the choices she has made as a mother, we can see her revealing to us the readers the heartbreaking story of her life as a mother that some mother still live today. The time spent searching for a job and actually working, night shifts and over time just to pay for a good day-care for their children is time wasted that could have been used into raising their children on their own, time that will never come back once lost. Sometimes first time mothers don't have the experience or just don't have the knowledge and try to take advice from the worst kinds of person there is, their kids end up in day-cares  that are worse than prisons, the children get abused or neglected. A lot of single mothers go through this same issue when the father decides to just leave the house  for unknown reasons just like my "dear" father who decided to leave my mother when me and my brother were still little kids, 4 (me) and 5 (my brother) to be more specific. Between studying and working, my mother had little time for us but she would never leave us at a day-care for she had worked at one and knew how other employees treated the kids over there, instead she left us with our grandma who treated us kindly and thanks to that neither my older brother nor me suffer nor anyone neglected us.

The Lottery

Another way of letting us know that tradition and rituals sometimes is wrong and damages society, I don't even know why it's called the lottery since when you talk about "lottery" you expect good things like money, fortune and a better life due to the money you win, but in here the one that "wins" is the one who gets stoned to death, I personally think that they did it to just kill someone since it says that they lost the original box and had forgotten about the original ritual. Sometimes some traditions are unnecessary like this one, why would you need to stone people to death? just for fun? This story somewhat represent ourselves nowadays since when there is a fight or argument in public or someone is beating someone else up we just flock towards and don't do much to help we just like the gossip to butt ourselves not to stop the problem or to try and help the others out but just "to fuel the fire" even more which is what we can see here in The Lottery, where not even the child were safe from such a nasty tradition, even the adults gave them pebbles to throw at Tessie, but no one seemed to help her as she cried out that the lottery was an unfair business, they just kept throwing stones at her until the very end of her life.

Poem: I found it by Fadwa Tuqan

Fadwa tells us how her soul found her soul, maybe in a way of realization, of groin up and becoming a mature and wise human being. I like this poem because it talks about life and about the soul and I think life and death go hand by hand, they are not the opposite of one another, they complement each other, one could not have died if one wasn't alive. Life and death are such mysteries, do you really live everything you were meant or supposed to live? and, is there something else beyond death? The truth is nobody knows, only the dead knows what goes on after life and they are not here with us to tell us what goes on beyond that point.

I remember the professor asking us how we pictured our lives after reading the part were Fudwa says "I found it after a long wandering. It was a tender evergreen bough were birds took shelter, a bough bending gently under storms." and I never got the chance to explain how I portrayed or see my life, well I portray my life to be a strong cherry blossom tree in full bloom, with flowers as beautiful as can be, with Cicadas making noises to cheer my life up, under blue skies with a white cloud here and there, supported by a small stone that never breaks, lit at night by fireflies that never stop shinning under the starry sky, with some storms seldom striking down and wetting the soil but the small rock is always there to support the tree. That's how I see my life that is what I think when I need to find myself, I think myself as that beautiful tree and how I have the support of that little but strong rock and I think I can also say that my soul found my soul.

Pizza in Warsaw, Torte in Prague.

This is the vivid example of how people take things for granted because they believe that that certain thing will always be available. One will have to live what other people live just to understand of how much misery the world has, like in this story that pizza was so scarce and who would have thought that piece of bread with tomato sauce and cheese would be so unavailable when it's so simple to have those three main ingredients. The narrator was used to having pizza and fast foods as he says in the beginning of this writing but when he the realized that this was not case in Warsaw he then realizes and tells us that even a lemon was a luxury to have at that time. One can only imagine how bad people would have been living in those times, we should call ourselves rich! we can go to our neighbor and ask for a lemon or just go to a lemon tree and pick up some lemons which is my case since my grandma has a huge lemon tree in her backyard. The other thing was the cake, who could have imagine that finding a cake would have been such an impossible task? Well it is mentioned here that even a cake was nowhere to be found in Prague in fact there were no pastries at all and today here in Puerto Rico you can go ANYWHERE and find a cake, muffin, doughnuts and such delicacies. This story will make you ponder and can actually make you realize that we are not poor at all, in fact we can consider ourselves rich compare to our distant neighbors across  the ocean far away or as close as in the Dominican Republic or Haiti which even water is a most needed recourse and is almost nonexistent.

The Falling Girl

Reading this made me realize how short life was and how sometimes people make decisions which later they regret, like Marta when she for a moment stops and fears that she would have made a mistake in jumping off of the building. One can only imagine the fear and the desperation that Marta felt as she realized this, but for what reason she jumped off? I cannot know. When I started reading I thought "maybe she can stop and be ok" since it was mentioned that she stopped and talked with some people and when the author uses the word "flying" I thought that it was a world of fantasy where everything is possible, where you can never die, when reality doesn't exists, but how wrong I was when at the end the old couple mention the "thud" sound letting us know that all of this was real and that they actually would hit the floor even though it seemed that they were flying or floating and not falling. Perhaps this is just another way of how people portray their lives, as a falling abyss with nothing more than disgrace, fear and pain, I got this from the fact that as she was falling the people greeting her were getting older and older until the end where there was an old couple and they said "At these low floors only falling old women pass by. You can see beautiful girls from the hundred-and-fiftieth floor up. Those apartments don't cost so much for nothing." or maybe this was just life for some women in a certain place, nevertheless I really liked it because of the fanciful influence and almost like an unreal and unnatural world  which I personally love. 

Examination at the Womb-Door

Weird yet fascinating poem, I found death to be such a fascinating and mysterious thing since no one knows for sure what goes on beyond it. Do we still live on? Do we reincarnate into someone or something else? I personally don't know but I hope we do. Like Ted Hughes said everything we have is owned by death as we are not eternal beings and we can't live forever. I think this is what Ted is trying to say here, that everything that composes our body is owned by death, since we all have to face it one day, ones sooner than others but we will have to. If you leave something behind, something that everyone will remember you for, of course you will be stronger than death as you will forever live on in your poem, song, invention or whatever you leave behind that leaves a legacy behind for people to remember you.

My thoughts about death are contradictory as I find it amusing and mysterious but I don't actually believe in it, I mean why would believe that all you have fight to achieve will suddenly disappear, that being physically or spiritually. Why believe your whole story and your whole life will end the moment your body stops working?

"Death makes life possible"

Poem: Those Winter Sundays

From what I could get from this poem the author is telling us in a way of memories about the time when he had his father with him, he remembers everything that happened in their house, how his father worked hard, even though his hand were torn from work and no one ever thanked him. At the end of the poem the author then realizes that he couldn't understand how much his father loved and cared him because he was a child and thought his father was too rough on him even though his father loved him and worked his life off for him. Same thing happens a lot in today's world some parents work as mules just to give their children a roof to live under and sometimes kids don't or can't see it and think that their parents are too rough on them because they can't spend the time they want with their children and the time they can have together they use it to teach their kids whats good and whats bad but sometimes kids misunderstand discipline with punishment or with hate. That's is just nature's way, kids are immature and can't see all the sacrifices their parents have to go through just to buy that expensive toy they seemed to have fallen in love with.

Just a thought for the teenagers out there:

Don't take for granted what your parents do for you, we all live in different times and one day you will realize that that time your dad or mom forbid you from going out with that certain friend to that certain place, was for your own good and not because they hated you. Sometimes one realizes that too late and then all you can do is mourn about it.

The Question No One Would Answer

Horrible Essay about a reality that goes on in Africa. Female circumcision which in no fact resembles a normal male circumcision which is just the removal of the foreskin for medical conditions or problems such as Phimosis which is a condition where the foreskin is extremely tight at the end of the penis and sometimes is so severe that makes it difficult for men to have intercourse and sometimes is so severe that it limits the pass of urine. Those kinds of circumcision have a purpose but a circumcision just so a human being can't feel pleasure because it's considered a prostitute or a whore, that's just irrational, ignorant and idiotic and even worse, go to the exceed any logic and remove the entire vulva along with the clitoris, I'm outraged at the thought of it. Even though both of them are a mutilation they can't be compared since a male will never die from a circumcision but female do sometimes die and in some cases have to be "re-open" to have intercourse and to give birth, in my opinion this NEEDS to be stopped with haste! Women need to start living their sexuality to the fullest just like men do in all of these cultures, this stupid mutilation needs to be stopped!