I too was amazed, along the lines of horrified, about the slavery and poverty information that was brought up in the lecture. I was also aware of sweatshops; it is hard not to be aware of sweatshops living at main campus, yet I wasn’t aware that slavery was still so prevalent. The statistic about how many people go hungry each night was shocking. My roommate this past year was an animal science major with horticulture as a minor. In one of her classes she had to come up with a lesson plan on how to educate developing countries on what crops will be good for their soil as well as nutritional to eat and cheap and easy to maintain. One of the girls in her group was actually going to use the lesson plans that they created when she went over seas this summer to teach and help local farmers somewhere in Africa. So hopefully that is a start to help lower the number of people who are going hungry.

My low score on the Whatd’ya Know quiz showed to me that I am not as aware of my surroundings and history in general as I previously thought. The questions that were asked really got me to think about things that I never really thought about prior. I found the facts about suicide and the Native Americans most interesting. Being a psychology major I have had classes that talked about suicide but not with a focus on race or gender. I was surprised to see the male to female ratio, 4:1. I had previously thought the other way around mostly because media focuses on the “perfect image” women should be. I also was interested in the 65 and over age group because prior to that statistic I had never really thought about suicide in the older age groups because most media outlets focus on teenage/early twenties suicides. The information about the Native Americans made me think. I was surprised to see how many tribes currently exist here in the United States. When I was younger I went to a summer camp in West Virginia and each cabin/year was the name of Native American tribe and it is only because of that camp that I know of about ten tribes. It was defiantly interesting to hear about the Native Americans struggle. I’ve always known about how the United States became the United States and how it was ‘acquired’, being the narrator for my fourth grade Thanksgiving Play helped, but not in the terms that Richards used. Genocide was defiantly not the term that was used in my fourth grade play to explain how ‘we’ got the land but I think it was more along the lines of a small scuffle and then all was dandy. I never realized, I guess since it was never talked about it in such away, that what the Native Americans went through was genocide because when I hear genocide I normally think of places that are no where near where I call home. But to think that the place I call home came to be because of genocide puts a whole new perspective on everything. It was also amazing to find out that half the world lives in such poverty, and not the type of poverty that is really seen here in the United State. I knew that an unfortunately large percentage of the population was in such a state but I had no idea that the percentage was that high. I remember hearing stories from my sister who lived in India for 4 months and China for a month about the poverty that she saw and it still did not sink in how bad it was until I saw the number of people who live it and the actual dollar amount they live on per day.

Greetings and Salutations