Reading The Rainbow Troops By Andrea Hirata

Many children will be born in poor regions and low income areas around the world and may not ever be presented with the opportunity for a decent education. Sherman Alexie brings this fact to the reader’s attention on a personal level in his short story “Superman and Me”. This story follows a young Indian boy into his struggle of illiteracy and acceptance from his peers and friends. Alexie was able to focus the reader’s attention and convey much of his feelings into his written words because the story was about him and his own personal experiences. “Superman and Me” projects a message to the reader, that when faced with adversity, and when all odds are against you, willpower and determination can overcome even the toughest of obstacles.

Education surrounds partially the entire world. Children, women, and men all attend school in America to build knowledge in order to find a job and make money. However, there are some places around the world where only men have access to education. For instance, Pakistan; located in South Asia, numerous amount of girls do not receive the education like other girls in America. This is specifically a problem for children, especially girls in Pakistan because they are not going to school like the girls in America, achieving the same level of education. Instead, they are seen as weak and are restricted from doing many things that men are allowed to do, like playing sports, going to school, participating in public events, and even being seen in public. Malala, a girl from Pakistan, sees the educational inequality where she lives and decides to fight for her educational freedom. Malala’s establishes her emotional appeals, credibility, and statistics to promote education for children in Pakistan by revealing her struggles fighting for

Education is an important necessity in every human being’s life. For some, school is just a dreadful constitution that people must sit in for 8 hours a day, eagerly waiting to get a diploma and move on in their next stage in life, however, for others it is life-saving and both Richard Rodriguez and Sherman Alexie can say this is their case. Education has made a great influence on both Alexie and Rodriguez’s life. Although both authors faced alienation due to their ethnic background, Alexie continuously keeps in touch with his Indian roots and family while Rodriguez has lost any contact that he has attained with his family and Mexican origins.

The issue of education provides a battleground for political debate and social issues. Writers such as Rodriguez, Alvarez, and Diaz explore different points of views of school children and how they deal with these issues. In addition, they provide them with a voice in which many children do not have. Looking into the thought processes of the minority children, “Daughter of Invention”, “The Boy Without a Flag”, and “Oscar Wao” look into what education provides for these children.

In the documentary “Time for School 3”, aired in 2009, executive producer Pamela Hogan, conducted an informative and thought-provoking project, which scrutinized the lives of seven children living in Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya, and Romania. Despite living in diverse countries, these seven children shared one attribute; the tussle of receiving a basic education.

“Education is the single most powerful tool in the fight against poverty and disease, and that the point of greatest impact is the primary education level where simply placing a pencil in a child’s hand is the first step toward unlocking the promise of a self-empowerment and a higher quality of life” (Braun, 72). Comparing education to a dominant tool did just that. Somewhere in the world, a child still stands with an outstretched hand asking for nothing more than a pencil. According to the Unesco Institute of Statistics, over 57 million children does not have access to education. Braun’s informational tone tells the reader that it’s a crisis that urgently needs to be solved.

War is something that is inevitable; it is something that cannot be stopped, something that is destined to happen. No one can really explain what a war is like without being in one, for none of those people can feel the pain and anguish of losing their family in a time of crisis, or running away in order to save their life. But when Ishmael Beah shares his story of the war he was in, Beah is able to describe the war in Africa in his memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, in such a way that is truly astonishing and is “a breathtaking and […] a truly riveting memoir” (Belinda Luscombe, Time).

Children’s development is a complex subject. Their maturity levels progress as the child grows older; however it has to do a lot with the environment they grow up in. One thing that stroked me when I was reading this article was poverty. We “know” many countries, such as Sri Lanka do not have the advantages as other countries, therefore people living there are under extreme poverty. Children feel so insecure about their future, particularly when it comes to food. This type of insecurity drives children to look for secure sources of food, that leads them to join an army (Somasundaram, 2002 page

This novel was a very enlightening, firsthand account of the atrocities of civil war that not only affect many countries and their citizens, but especially children. Ishmael Beah was separated from his family at age 12 because he and his brother were away from their home in the small country of West Africa known as Sierra Leone, performing in a rap group with friends, when their home village was attacked. Ishmael, his brother and their friends wandered from village to village in search of food and shelter among the confusion, violence, and uncertainty of the war. Ishmael’s recounting of his experiences is emotionally disheartening and hard for someone like me to truly fathom, but yet I do know that these atrocities exist in our modern world.

In addition, Junior and his family sometime skipped dinner because they don’t have money to buy food. The worse more than skipped dinner is a junior’s poor little dog, Oscar, is shot by his father because Oscar was very sick and they didn’t have money bring him to a vet. Also, his parent decided to kill him because a bullet cost only two cents, and anybody can afford that. It feels sad when I read this point because don’t want kill Oscar but the poverty bring to this points. Furthermore, poverty of Indian tribe required Indians kids learned the same books as his parents studied. For example, Junior needed to learn the geometry book that his mum studied before. The books are at least more 31 years old because right now his mum is 31 years old. Overall, after I read these chapters I feels sad and pity all Indian people that need to fight poverty to

In “Investing in Education”, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn illustrate how having the power of education can help overcome poverty, inequality and economic development. It’s begins with the story of a young girl the met when they were newly married, Dai Manju, in China. The family lived in a one room wooden shack, with no running water or electricity, plus they share the space with a large pig. Dai Manju is an excellent student, but she was forced to drop out of sixth grade, because her parents didn’t see any reason for girls to get an education if they going to spend their time “hoeing fields and darning socks” (Kristof and WuDunn, 167). However, Dai Manju life changed drastically when Kristof wrote an article for the New York Times about her story.

In the book A Soldier’s Secret, the story is told from the perspective of Sarah Emma Edmonds, alias Frank Thompson. Sarah Emma Edmonds is a soldier, nurse, and spy for the Union Army of the Civil War. To avoid an arranged marriage and get away from her father’s abusive hands, Sarah escaped Brunswick, Canada dressed in her brother’s clothes as a man. You learn very quickly that the story is told Sarah’s perspective. For example, when Sarah is enlisting, she is told that she cannot enlist because she is too young. When this happens, Sarah states, “I freeze. Can he tell? I’m wearing a shirt, vest, and trousers as usual, my curly hair cut short except for a lock that insists on falling over my forehead” (1). This shows

As such, the exigency of equal opportunities in destitute countries is then proffered by Lessing within the exordium through the tricolon, “There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books”, as the succinct description of the educational environment within Zimbabwe, provocatively elucidates the clear inadequacy of education within developing nations, compared to developed nations. In light of this, this comparison between developed and penurious nations, is elicited through the constant contrasting between the developed and destitute throughout the speech, notable through the juxtaposition of the “school in North London” with the “School in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe”, wherein the poignant illustration of the different pedagogical environments and literature within disparate culture emphasises the need for educational equality. In light of this, the speech then pivots, using persuasive rhetoric having already attained audience engagement, as Lessing explores the power

In A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, Education or the lack thereof shows it’s importance in a modern day society. The novel uncovers many problems in Afghanistan and how they could have been prevented from an educated public, especially women. Empowered women might have had a bigger influence in their society regarding the Taliban, abuse and child/unwanted marriage if they were educated and couldn’t become victimized by men.

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was an event that truly began when Greenpeace first formed, almost two decades before the bombing in Auckland Harbour occured. In the late 1960s, the United States government planned to carry out nuclear testing on Amchitka, an unstable island in Alaska which had a dangerous fault line and was prone to earthquakes and tsunamis after the serious earthquake in Alaska, 1964. A group known as the ‘Don’t Make A Wave’ committee formed to protest against the nuclear testing on the island. The committee began to make plans for other campaigns against nuclear testing elsewhere, as well as establishing their first office in Vancouver, Canada. Many of the members then decided to take the next step with their committee,