Our speaker today Martin Suarez, taught in a prison for about 10 years. He shared his experiences, motives, and lessons learned from this experience. One thing that struck me during his talk was the passion he displayed when talking about the change he thinks he made. There was a moment where he expressed his passion by saying, “The people in prison taught me more than I taught them, They inspired me to treasure the little things in life. He also talked about his two favourite pupils Gaby and German. Gaby grew up in a very rough childhood, he had an abusive father who tried to kill his mother and him. He had to fend for himself in the violent streets of Argentina. He had killed numerous people and thus he a ‘Maximum Risk’ prisoner. One thing that Mr. Suarez said was German had only killed people like corrupt officials and other criminals. He never had a knack to kill innocent people. German on the other hand grew up with a family who loved him and one that took care of him. However, he got into some shady dealings involving stolen cars and thus he was put in prison. Gaby and German both had kids and it was evident that “They couldn’t live a single day without thinking of their daughters”. Gaby was extremely clever and he used to study religiously under the tutoring of Mr. Suarez. He even ended up almost passing law school. German on the other hand used to help the other inmates study and he was constantly being nice to everyone. I was so mesmerized by the talk that, I had not even taken two lines of notes by then. Here we had two people who made mistakes in their lives, yet they never gave up and kept pushing to be the best they could be. After getting out of prison, German went on to open up his own car repair shop, which was very successful. Gaby on the other hand also got out of prison with his almost completed law degree. However, Mr. Suarez thinks that he has gotten back into organized crime because the last time he went to visit him, Gaby couldn’t look him the eye when he asked him about what he was doing. Gaby specifically said, “Life is hard for me. It is hard to get jobs for prison inmates and I have lost a lot of loved ones.”. This made me realise that not every story has a happy ending.

Our speaker talked about her experience of being a child protector, This talk was not too interesting for me as I didn’t find anything compelling about her story. It was mostly just facts and there she didn’t really talk about her personal connection with the topic. However, I was slightly interested by the topic of child protection as I had never heard about it before. I was interested in how the various ways they help protect Children, whose rights are being violated. This experience deepened my understanding of the story as she gave some cases of the kids she dealt with. I never really understood the extent to which child abuse was happening. She gave us an example of this kid, whose parents locked her in a washing machine, and then turned it on. This really shocked me and it made me appreciate the work these officers were doing. This session helped me understand what it means to think like a writer as I was able to analyze the personal perspective of the speaker even though she barely gave any personal opinions. I had to ask her appropriate questions to try and coax her to tell us some information. In the end some of the questions like “Why did you get into Child Protection?” made her give some personal perspective to child protection but I still think that she should have mentioned it more.

We had a talk with Cameron Hunter, a survivor of the boxing day tsunami back in 2004. He was in Phuket when the Tsunami hit the city. He also happened to be on the beach right at the moment the Tsunami struck. He was extremely lucky survivng even though his family and him were stuck in the first wave. Barely making it to ground ground just in time. If I had five questions I could ask him:-

Has this experience made you more spiritual as a person?                                                                                                              I I would ask him this question as there are a lot of cases in which people become more spiritual as a whole after surviving a natural disaster. Thus I would be very interested to see if this affected him

Are you now paranoid to go to the same area and would you visit Phuket again?                                                                              I really want to ask him this question ask it would be very interesting to see his thoughts and whether he fears tsunamis now.

Have you emphtised more with tsunami victims and do you donate more to similar funds as a result of this?                                        I think that this question would be very good as it will tell me more about whether he holds this moment close to him as if he wouldn’t then he won’t care about others in the same situation

Was there any moment where you thought you sould not survive?                                                                                                 This question will be a nice addition as I could obtain a change of content in an article I would writing as, so far I have just asked questions about happenings after the tsunami not during. These will be a great addition to my story

Are you still traumatised by the event and if you are how are you dealing with the Trauma?                                                              I would ask this question as it could provide some interesting information on the type of person he is and wheter he is scared of the incident.

As I walked into this session, I barely had any thoughts about the apartheid problem in South Africa due to the fact that I had never heard the term being used a lot before. However, the speaker, was very friendly and she seemed eager to share her stories with us. However when the speaker was talking, I could sens a bit of sadness in her voice. She had clearly expressed in her speech that she was deeply involved withing the movement and that she cared a lot. I just expected the talk to have a lot of facts but what surprised me is the fact that she used a lot of personal examples and this helped me feel connected to the story. I could really understand where her perspective was coming from. For example she told us about various times where she herself had seen examples of racial behaviour and some of the examples were very crude and unique that I had never heard them anywhere else. After the talk I still wonder how much her family was involved with apartheid because she never mentioned them a lot. I would have asked her if she had a  specific moment which inspired her to help fight apartheid.