Activity Reflection 5 – Badminton

Over the course of the season playing badminton and doing track and field was quite hard to maanage with schoolwork due to the many training it had a week but I think it was worth all that time and effort. Both activities taught me a lot of values and made me learn a lot of things about myself. My teamwork and communication skills have definitely improved over the course of the season playing these sports, from badminton it was through playing doubles – which I am not very fond of but I have started to enjoy it because even though it is less physical than singles it is more mentally exhausting and requires more focus as you have to be aware of where your partner is at all times, it also requires a lot more of strategy.

Do we have the right to tell another person’s story?

Q. Do we have the right to tell another person’s story?

I believe that we do have the right to tell another person’s story as long as the story does not become to personal and none if the person’s private information is revealed. This is also based on what the story is about, if it is insulting the other person then it may not be fair to them/the person you are writing about. Everyone has different opinions on this topic, for some people they wouldn’t mind if someone wrote about them while for others they may feel offended by it. However if you’re writing someone else’s story you’re stealing their voice and their ‘property’ which isn’t right. If the story is about you and they happen to be apart of it then I feel you have every right to do so

Social Media – Highs and Lows

Over the past month in PSE we have been talking about social media and its effect on peoples lives, it can be both good for a person and bad. It can lead to cyberbullying which is a form of bullying but mainly online, this can be worse because more people will know about it and start making fun of you too but it is also good because now you have evidence of the fact that you are being bullied and can show it to your teachers or your parents. We have also spoken about sexting which is when people send sexually explicit pictures to one another, this is very unsafe because the person you send it too can always share it online and this will get you not only in trouble but also it will affect you mentally and make you feel ashamed of yourself. The last thing we spoke about is online behaviors and self-esteem which is how social media and being online can affect your self-esteem if you are being made fun of or more. To conclude social media can help you by helping you make friends or it can make your life worse by causing you to lose friends and get bullied. Social media is both good and bad and it depends on the person using it, you have to be very safe when you are online and should not take many risks.

Girl in the River – Debate

The girl in the river is a story about a girl in Pakistan called Saba, who married a man secretly without her parents’ permission and was the victim of attempted murder by her father and uncle. After her attackers were caught there was going to be a case but due to pressure from her husbands family and the community they lived in she decided to forgive them and let them be released. This incident caused a huge debate worldwide on whether she should have taken the case to court or forgiven them, which she did. The debate then rose to whether human rights were universal or culturally relative. Universal human rights mean that the rules are the same for everyone no matter where they are from, who they are or their culture. Culturally relative human rights are rights that can be disobeyed if it is wrong in the culture or a sin in a religion and the person who committed this “crime” can be punished. In Saba’s case, her uncle and father attacked her because she had run out of the house in their culture it shows no respect and is said to break the honor of a family. But Saba believes that she has her own rights such as – Freedom of choice, Right to life etc. The elders in the community said that if a girl runs away from her parents’ house that whole family loses respect in the community and even Saba’s  brother in law said that if she filed a case it would benefit no one in the community but Saba at first thought that she would never forgive but for respect for her new family she decided to forgive them and she has now started to visit her mother like once a week.

Squash Tournament Experience

Have you excelled at a Sport, during an assignment or in an event?

This year I have started to play squash a lot more consistently then I used to in India, I play it almost 3-4 times a week which is Monday, Wednesday, Friday and sometimes Saturday. Playing consistent amounts of squash has really impacted my tournament results. I played a tournament at the Kallang SG tennis center almost a month ago for which I had trained the few before for. That training really seemed to help me as it was not only squash training but physical fitness too. I used to go running in the morning and in the evening I used to go to the gym for an hour. In the Kallang Squash tournament, I reached the quarter-finals in which I lost in a 5 set match to the number 4-Seed who is from Malaysia.I wasn’t upset that I lost but I was thrilled with the way I fought during the match by saving 4 match points in the 4th set to take the game 15-13. I think that if I keep working this hard by training and fitness I could soon be winning tournaments in Singapore.

Robyn Hayes Feature Article

Photography – A work of the arts

 

There is a saying “A picture speaks a thousand words”, and this is exactly what Robyne Hayes does. She uses photographs as a way of telling stories, stories of girls forced into marriage at a young age and robbed of an education.

 

Robyne Hayes is a world renowned-photographer who uses photography as a way to help many suffering children, mainly girls who are forced into child marriage at a very young age. Over the last decade, she has worked in underdeveloped places like Ethiopia, Nepal, Bangladesh etc. where child marriage is very common and she aims to stop it worldwide. At least one third (⅓) of the girls are married before the age of 18. She is extremely committed to her mission. She travels to these countries with a small group of people consisting of photographers, some locals, and a translator.

 

“The power of photography is so simple but so powerful and can touch people around the world,  just one picture can change a person’s opinion.”

 

Life isn’t easy for young girls in countries like Ethiopia for example; they aren’t treated fairly and are only valued for their ability to be mothers and to cook. For just a moment try putting yourself in this 13-year old girl’s shoes – she has been married for a year to a man much older than her, she has never gone to school or had any form of education. She like another 130 million girls worldwide who haven’t been allowed to go to school.

She is 13 years old she has been working with Robyne Hayes in one of her projects. Here she stands for a photo outside her house.

https://photos.smugmug.com/The-Places-Ive-Been/Ethiopia/i-XrxXqPN/1/2b1edadb/S/Ethiopia-black%20and%20white-1-S.jpg

 

It’s hard for these girls as they live in a society in which girls are not allowed out of the house, not allowed to work and their opinion or choice does not matter. In each of her projects, Robyn takes a different and sensitive approach based on the type of society she works in and whether they are accepting or refusing to change. She so strongly believes that child marriage does not deserve a place in our modern society and that all girls around the world should be treated equally and with respect.

 

In one or two of her projects, known as the Photovoice Project, girls in an Ethiopian village were given cameras for a week, and during that week they were supposed to take photos of whatever they found interesting and at the end, all the girls had to present their photos to the rest of the group. This helped them build confidence to speak out their opinions. This project was very effective and soon girls who had previously not been allowed to leave the house, were now allowed to work, go to school and the men even started to help in daily chores like drying the clothes or cooking. A small intervention and idea from Robyn brought about immediate social change.

An Ethiopian girl holds a camera for the first time ( Photovoice Project), trying to take a photo as a woman and a man watch from behind

https://blog.usaid.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/1Photovoice12-460×306.jpg

 

Quite a few of Robyne Hayes’s projects have been successful over time, as a sincere social change has occurred to strengthen and secure the girls in society. But “success isn’t always the case,” Robyne said. A lot of time the projects have not been successful due to a stubborn society which believes that men are superior to the women and girls, and on a few occasions the projects had to be ditched as Robyn and her team was told to leave by the community members. “We try our best to convince the leader or village head, to let us work but sometimes they believe what they are doing is right, and we are unable to convince the village head and continue the project.”

 

I personally think that the way Robyne Hayes has discovered and used photography as a way to get help and support for her projects is much better than other NGOs and their way of writing articles on facebook as photos attract viewers on facebook, twitter etc. unlike writing which people can get really bored by looking at it. Robyne Hayes has opened and showed to the world how strong photography is and how it can be used in the future.

Robyne Hayes says that she doesn’t use photography as a way of showing the world the problems, but uses it as a means to show “Empathy and Understanding” and to “sensitize the world visually of a very serious social problem”.  For the past 10 years, Robyne Hayes has met many girls and women around the world who are treated so badly that they don’t have the confidence to even express themselves in front of others. But she has realized that photography is a strong tool that these girls can use to have a conversation with the rest of the world through just one photograph. And these types of photos help these girls get support from thousands of people and it builds up their confidence and introduces them to a whole new world.

 

To many people around the world, photography is not a hobby, it is art. It is a way of expressing one’s emotions and feelings. It is a window to a new life.  

Dpers Question Ranking Reflection

My final question was How does technology represent you?  I found this question very debatable as there will be many people with different opinions to me and I knew that this question was a really true question because if you check someone’s phone based on the apps they have or the type of social media they use you can tell someone’s personality or the type of person they are. I found the matchup between How technology affects relationships and How technology represents you really hard to decide which one to choose. Some of the logical fallacies I will have to avoid are Begging the question -This local fallacy makes a person to justify his/her point they say a big source from where they read it.https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/begging-the-question. I think the Age of Digital transcendence is the best reading that answers and discusses the question I have chosen.

 

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