This is the last class on 12th week for Seminar on Current Affairs course. Many interesting activities took place in the three hours session including students’ participation and story writing activity. The whole class was conducted by Mr. John Britto and other lecturers also participated actively and made the session interesting.
At the very beginning, a joke was shared by the lecturer. The excerpt from the joke is,. There are two types of people in the world. One has to work along and accept things without questions. Another has to ask question before accepting things or doing works. The whole world is balanced with these two types of people and we need both the types in the society. If all people start to ask question, then who will answer and if all the people take instruction and work, who will give instruction and obtain information?
In the nest session, a logo of UN was shown. The excerpt from this display was, in reality and original map, the world-look from a side view, but in this logo, the world is drawn from the top-view and no county is in center. Furthermore, 8 logos of 9 MDGS (Millennium Development Goals) that the countries around the world were agreed upon in 2000 to obtain within 2015 were displayed. None of us could correctly tell what were the logos about? Sooner after the class, we were able to identify each of them and connect them in a thread.
In the next session, we were shown 8 videos on the Millennium Goals and asked to write a story. Few of us got chance to read up in front of the audience. My story was about a family with 3 children who does not own land and cannot afford sending their two sons to school. Besides, they think education for women is not necessary and they should get married earlier. Suddenly their younger son dies in Pneumonia and they become helpless. After few years, the family gets another son and the mother gets sick. But as the father is a farmer, he cannot afford the cost of mother’s healthcare, though she became healthy slowly. One day they hear from friends that the father’s nephew got affected in Malaria and no sufficient medication is there in the village. So they bring him in their village and give him healthcare. In the meanwhile, the doctors suggest not to drink water in that village, because the water is contaminated with Arsenic, a chemical material in the soil. They become helpless again as they do not have money to buy mineral water. But after few days, the father gets self-employed by an NGO and starts up a small grocery shop. Finally he lives a happy life with his family.
Hence the story was about connecting and implementing the solution for the problems the family was facing. These solutions came to the document of MDGS as:
Eradicating Extreme Poverty and Hunger
Achieving Universal Primary Education
Promoting Gender Equality and Empowering Women
Reducing child Mortality Rates
Improving Maternal Health
Combating HIV/AIDS. Malaria and other diseases
Ensuring Environmental Sustainability
Developing a global Partnership for Development
In the next session, students were called and had to participate in an interesting activity which was to arrange things with whatever they had, similar to the MDGS logos on the floor. Boys and girls were separated and finally boys won. The later session was not a moment of happiness. It was a moment of saying goodbye. It was an end of a rare teaching-learning method “Team Teaching” for this trimester. At the end, the lecturers stated their comments, shared their moments of happiness and sadness and wished best of luck to all the students.
Therefore, in my point of view, the final reflection should not be finished here. The amount of knowledge we learnt from this course and the amount of doors to seek for more knowledge have been opened should have been uncountable. The most important thing that I got to realize is there is nothing as current affairs or current incident in the real sense which does not have any past connection. All the incidents have inside philosophy and historical perspective and that is how the impacts are meaningful of a current event.