Service Learning Blog #2

This week I helped my community partner actually do our event which was a huge success!  We held a meeting on Monday, November 5, where we discussed how we helped them  raise $2250 for the Invisible Children’s Frontline Tour!  According to DA/IC’s President, Vanessa, we were the most attended college event in the state of Florida and we raised the most amount from all the colleges in the state of Florida, only a private high school in southern part of the state beat us financially.  The rest of the meeting was about the positions available during the next election and fundraising ideas for the spring term.

When one realizes that part of the on-going war in Uganda that is now spread to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan is over resources, as H. Patricia Hynes puts it “the connection between the domination of women and the domination of nature” (539) is clear.  The fact that women must send their children away on buses in the middle of the night to avoid being kidnapped by the LRA is an example of what Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey call the “feminization of poverty” (314) because if these women had access to safe environments, they could afford to leave home to work to provide for their families.  While it is children who are kidnapped, it is the mothers who try to be a “voice to the disempowered,” because Joseph Kony rules through intimidation and fear and “tries to make sure that no one listens,” just like a sexual perpetrator  (Kirk & Okazawa-Rey 268).  Through attempts to educate the public and demand policy change, understanding how violence against women is “part of a general pattern of violence between the powerful and the powerless,” it makes it easy to understand how the “anti-violence movement must be an anti-oppression movement” (Kirk & Okazawa, 267).

Works Cited

Hynes, H. Patricia. "Consumption (1999)." Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. 5th ed. New york, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 567-73. Print.

Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. "Women's Bodies, Women's Health." Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. 5th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2010.

Word Count: 352