These days I’ve been working on my major assignment, about the child soldiering that is taking place in DR Congo. It’s so hard for me not to get emotionally involved with the readings and the findings I have from the web-search assignment… For I can’t stop thinking that there is a kind of horrible life like that out there.
Those children, they are only around 8 years old when they are abducted and made soldiers. Instead of playing with toys they are playing with guns… Instead of running with their friends in the yard, they have to run through the hills from the morning ‘til the afternoon as a physical training… and those who can not survive were just left there to die. They are disposable. No wonder Save the Children calls them as ‘the world’s cheapest biological weapons’!
No parents accompanying them sleeping; they have to sleep alone outside the tents. No more fun of playing with water, they have to stay in a tank of cold water during the night if they made a mistake. No hot chicken soup, a loaf of cold bread is all they have for the whole day. And there in the camp, a boy has to watch his 10 year old sister being raped to death. My goodness!
And the thing that strikes me the most is the involvement of multinational companies in the supply of weapons. It’s a big business… produces a lot of money! And the state is using the country’s resources such as diamonds, gold and coltan to buy sophisticated weaponry. Know what coltan is? Coltan is a kind of mineral that is used mostly to produce capacitors, which are very much used in small electronic devices like mobile phones, laptop, digital cameras, etc. All the things that we use everyday! Today in the presentation Kara pointed out that somehow we are participating in financing the war…but we just can’t escape it. How frustrating.
One more thing, imagine that diamond in the fingers of many happy brides. Such diamond carry the blood of the children pushed from their homes to do the mining work… and the same diamond enabling the war makers to buy more weapons and continue the violence…
This diamond-thing is taking much of my attention cuz it reminds me to one of the assignment that I have in my undergrad study, I forgot which one actually, maybe it’s for the Marketing Communication subject. We are assigned to make advertising, and I remember I took diamond ring as the product that I advertised. I emphasized so much on how diamond symbolized love, affection, commitment… I never imagine that such diamond could came from a long process of hurting miners like that (and financing war!). And those multinational companies… I used to have them as a case study, of how wonderful they are in managing business. And now…
There’s a big change of paradigm (in terms of studies) happening to me, I know. That’s why sometimes it’s so tiring… Its like, from the sparkling world of marketing, when I learn how to please the customer to make them buy more of the products, how to manage the production so all the machines will continue to produce, how to ‘motivate’ the employees so they will work more efficiently for the company…now I’m coming to the bleak social world, but yet so real.
Oh, it makes me realize that this Christmas is so different for me. I mean, well, look at me; I’m becoming a different person!
Instead of thinking about what kind of dress to wear in the Xmas celebration, I’m thinking of those refugees who don’t even have a place to live… (Gee!)
Instead of browsing through the stacks of goods in the supermarket for Christmas shopping, now I’m browsing through the stacks of books in the library.
Instead of rushing for practicing my part in the Christmas perfromance, I’m rushing for a group-assignment meeting.
And I left all the things that I used to do in Christmas time… decorate the Christmas tree with my sister, spend hours to put all the decorations into place… Get Santa and his friends out of the box where he hides for the whole year, lay the snowman pillows on the couch, making some cookies with mom…
There’s a part of me feeling sad for not having the ‘joy of Christmas’ as I used to have… but then I think, how can I be happy realizing and seeing the world that we live is this terrible.
Oh, am I taking my studies too seriously? Or is this a part of being a grown up person?
Hiks! -_-
