Blog 1: Cholera Epidemic --Where does it all go?

It has now been just over a year since the devastating earthquake in Haiti.  The death toll as a direct result of the event has been recorded at 230,000, with over 1.3 million people homeless.  This 7.0 magnitude event is nothing shy of a global disaster.  Media coverage just shortly after the event was pretty immense.  Within a matter of days, the Red Cross sent in a relief team from Geneva with two planes loaded with emergency food aid.  NGOs such as, UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, Samaritan’s Purse, and even the Red Cross instantly began asking for donations to help fund this international assistance.  However within a few months, the story just seemed to fall off the face of the planet.

As far as the general public is concerned, ‘no news is good news”.

October 19, 2010, cholera outbreaks began to be seen in Haiti’s central plateau.  These outbreaks have expanded into epidemics by around December 8, 2010.  At around this point in time, Haiti was the front page article and headline news story for many media centers around the world.  It is pretty obvious to guess what happened next.  A new cycle of advertising by the NGOs I listed, sprung up again in many ways, shapes and forms.

Now for a naïve, 22 year old university student bent on studying for exams and enjoying my winter vacation, I did not hear a word about the cholera epidemics until I returned to school in January.  I just so happened to be unfortunate enough to hear about it from the clipboard mafia at UBC.  These are the poor individuals hanging around the Tim Horton’s and White Spot who try to get you to sign up and donate for a good cause.  Most people milling about try to pretend that the clipboard mafia don’t exist, and begin to walk around more purposefully and avoid eye contact as to not become sucked in for a mere two minutes to hear about a cause.  I was one such person avoiding eye contact when one of these mafia hippies looked at me and quite abrasively asked, “do you have a moment to save a life?”
How can any decent human refuse a request like that?

I was quickly informed by this UNICEF volunteer about the cholera epidemic that is plaguing Haiti and that my monthly donation via Master or Visa Card would help turn the advancing tides of death and sorrow.  After hastily scrambling out of the situation (with the saving grace of not owning a credit card), I began to ponder where the money actually went.

After doing some brief research on various NGOs online, I quickly realized how much advertising was being done to gain donations from individuals browsing around their sites.  Almost every page I visited had a link directing me back to a form to fill out for an online donation.  With all the searching I did only one site, UNICEF, offered a vague summary of how much money would provide basic needs.  This still did not answer my question about where the money was actually going.  It also led me to believe that media is acting as more of a utility to boost donations to a certain organization, but not really solving anything on ground level in Haiti.

It seems to me that to the general North American population, Haiti was becoming a fad.  News spread like wildfire across Twitter and Facebook.  4 out of the 10 most popular topics posted on twitter were related to Haiti.  Not only is there promotion on the big social network sites, but also via text messaging service providers.  You can donate $10 dollars to Red Cross just by texting the word HAITI to 90999.  Mechanisms like these facilitate the donation process since they just tag the bill onto your monthly service provider invoice.
The idea of throwing money at Haiti without knowing where it goes is a big issue for me.  From what I gather, all of these NGOs are just offering aid in terms of doctoral care, personal water purification devices, shelter, and for the religious even prayer.  This to me seems like treating an infection with a bandage.  It’s not getting to the root of the problem:  where someone in Port-au-Prince gets their drinking water is where someone else’s bathroom is.  The infrastructure needs to be restored to beat the epidemic.  If the problem is not solved at the roots, these NGOs will have no reason to get out of Haiti and the local population will take much longer to recover.

Resources:

Direct Relief International:
http://www.directrelief.org/EmergencyResponse/2010/HaitiCholera.aspx?gclid=CJiamuuj7aYCFQRvbAodaA2GEg

Doctors Without Borders:
http://www.msf.ca/

Fox News on texting and scams:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/01/25/haiti-earthquake-aftermath-help/

UNICEF donation page:
https://secure.unicef.ca/portal/SmartDefault.aspx?at=1211&appealID=90&CID=91&gclid=CIm7npmh7aYCFRtVgwodQykVIg

Red Cross on Haiti:
http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=000005&tid=003

International Rescue Committee:
http://www.rescue.org/special-reports/crisis-haiti?ms=gg_zzzz_zzz_zzzz_kg_11zzzz&gclid=CPS07dWg7aYCFQRubAodeUDuEw

Haiti Facts:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Haiti-Earthquake-Facts

Social Networking and Haiti:
http://teck.in/sms-donation-and-twitter-trends-on-haiti-earthquake.html

The Samaritan’s Purse:
http://www.samaritanspurse.ca/ourwork/reliefwork/Haiti/webinar.aspx

Blog 4: Graffiti--you are what you...write?

Satirical Support for an Islamic Extremist group? Or did the author really support them? Anonymity is the perfect mask.

I find it amusing that graffiti seems to follow some form of spatial gradient.  This said gradient can be located in almost any space, and flows from very public areas to hidden areas.  Not only is there this social gradient, but there is also an authoritative one.  Graffiti generally is not seen in police buildings, nor is it visible on the desks of teachers or administrators in educational institutions.  Instead, graffiti is found in larger quantities as far away from any form of authoritative personality and in the most hidden places. This idea became fairly obvious to me when I was just deciding on where to go in order to look for some graffiti for this assignment.  I had some ideas of where I knew graffiti was just based on where I go on a daily basis.  I ended up scouring Koerner Library’s basement stacks for suitable graffiti.

There is a definite difference between graffiti found in academic institutions compared to other locations in society.  There seems to be much deeper implications in the messages scribbled on desks in the silent study area of the library.  What exactly did I find down there?  That’s a fairly broad question.  I found graffiti ranging from racial discrimination, to sexual preferences, and all sorts of hate towards specific classes at UBC.  I should mention that I did not find any graffiti negatively portraying ANTH 378.  What was unique about this graffiti was the fact that it was not just a simple statement, but rather a running conversation in the depths and furthest corners of the library.  I remember one desk said “JEW.B.C.”, and quickly all around it were scribbles of protest voting for multiculturalism.  The swearing that followed in the argument was nothing shy of the language used on Youtube comments:  blunt and highly offensive.

Racial discrimination in graffiti "UBC needs more Niggaz."

This anonymity allows for an individual to truly state what they are thinking.  No cultural norms or taboos need to be respected in graffiti. It is just a string of consciousness of the scribe at a given time.  Gonos et al. (1976, pp. 41) states that graffiti is a pure indicator of how what values and beliefs are truly held by a community without endangering the security of the author.  This is a pretty powerful statement.  If this were the case, it would be safe to say that the student population of UBC is extreme racist, misogynous, and xenophobic.

Is this really the case for Canada?

Maybe it is.  It may not appear this way in legislation or in a classroom, but it could be in peoples’ minds. Graffiti acts as the tool for people to display their political standings.  Nwoye (1993, pp. 419) displays how graffiti in academic institutions can be used to deny mainstream beliefs and ideas of a society.  It’s entirely possible that people hold these ideas close to their hearts, and graffiti allows them to portray what they truly believe without the fear of condemnation.

A debate of what it is to be "gay".

Finally, I want to end on the fact that graffiti must be taken in the historical context of which it was first written.  McCoy (2007, pp. 173) brings up some graffiti that she observed that said “I love PK”.  She contemplates if that person still really does love PK now, and if it stirs some sort of emotional reaction when it is seen by the author.  Although the expressions that I found were very negative towards certain groups in Vancouver society, it could just be old feelings.  Maybe the original authors have a new opinion on matters concerning race and sexuality.  Is it truly fair to judge a society as Gonos et al. does in his article?  I think it is, only if you can determine that the graffiti is meant to be taken in the present historical context.  What was considered the stream of consciousness for somebody writing on a wall at one point in time could look completely different in a matter of months, especially in a university environment.  With so many interdisciplinary studies people are constantly re-evaluating their belief systems, and this comes out as new graffiti replaces or adds to existing graffiti.

The lone, contemplative author...

NOTE:  All pictures taken by Eric Fontaine.  Location of graffiti:  UBC at Koerner Library Floor 1. NE corner of building.  All from two secluded study desks among the stack of books.

Resources:

Gonos, G., Mulkern, V., & Poushinsky, N. (1976). Anonymous Expression: A Structural View of Graffiti. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 89, No. 351: 40-48.

McCoy, L. (2007). Graffiti. The Iowa Review, Vol. 37: 173-174.

Nwoye, O. G. (1993). Social Issues on Walls: Graffiti in University Lavatories. Discourse & Society, Vol. 4: 419-442.

Blog 3: JAI LO(L)--The story of how it all went wrong.

From knowledge to seduction
(Source: www.hole-in-the-wall.com, www.desinuts.com/pages/2/)

“May victory be yours”.  It’s hard to see where this sentence, the meaning of ‘Jai Ho’, fits in to anything portrayed in the Pussycat Doll version of this song.  But, as being one of the few people in North America who hasn’t watched Slumdog Millionaire, who am I to judge.  I think the degradation of the meaning of the song into portraits of scantily-dressed, seductive women has a lot to do with the reproducibility of the genre of art. Walter Benjamin describes loss of authenticity of an original piece of art as versions of it are reproduces (1936, pp. 6).  With this in mind, I thought the next logical step would be to locate the original source, and then trace all of its adaptations down to the Pussycat Doll hit version.

So, just as any good university student would, I went to the source of all knowledge on the internet:  Wikipedia.  I soon discovered that Slumdog Millionaire was an adaptation of the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup.  From this point, I wanted to figure out where the inspiration for the novel came from.  Surprisingly, there was an original project implemented in a slum of Delhi called ‘Hole in the Wall’.  Experimenters installed a computer in this slum and allowed children to interact and learn from it without any guidance or direction.

The big question is how is the Hole in the Wall Project linked to the Pussycat Doll version of Jai Ho?

This gets back to what Walter Benjamin (1936, pp. 2) was getting at when he discussed how art loses its ‘aura’ as it gets reproduced.  I had to break it down into basic concepts in order to relate each reproduced product to the next version.  What I gathered from the Hole in the Wall project website was that its main purpose was to show that the need to obtain knowledge was compulsory, and hardwired into what it is to be human.  I think this was the first and most basic form of art.  It is almost a human ritual to gain knowledge, and the ways in which the children were doing so was almost in a pure and innocent fashion.  The way that this translates over to the novel form has to do with this link of knowledge.  In the book, the main protagonist is retelling his life story to a lawyer about how he knows the answer to questions asked in a game.  Then the movie adapts this version with Jamal recounting to the authorities on how he has gained certain knowledge over time in order to win the Mumbai ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire”.  Going from the project to the interpretive movie form already depreciates the original art.  This occurs just in the way that Benjamin Walters describes in terms of a focal point (1936, pp. 4).  In the original experiment, people would analyze the behavior of these children and interpret for themselves.  The novel is a whole new form of art for this idea of knowledge.  The text mediates between the audience and the author’s interpretations of the original project art. Slumdog Millionaire, in the words of Clifford Geertz (1973, pp. 11), is just another interpretation of an interpretation.  The same basic theme of understanding how knowledge is gained is preserved, but the camera instead of text is mediating between the audience and how the script writer and director want to portray the story.

Connecting this to the original music video of ‘Jai Ho’ is a little more difficult.  The music video exemplifies the result of the movie.  Jamal is victorious in winning “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”.  And from this comes the Pussycat Doll version.  The degradation of the original art is pretty absolute.  The ‘aura’ is almost completely gone.  Trying to derive the original concept of compulsory knowledge gain from a music video including half-naked dancing girls is virtually impossible.  But, maybe the music video holds some new art form for analysis.

Works Cited

Geertz, C. (1973). Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

Walters, B. (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Los Angeles.