Responding to other students' reading tasks-from Alison

Date: Sep17, 2007

As I listened to Ibrahim's reading report and Jay's, I was glad to learn something new from their topics--Ibrahim's topic is “Starvation in Africa”, and Jay’s is “Loneliness”.

In Ibrahim’s report, he firstly pointed out the main problems of Africa followed by the author’s statement. He mentioned that one of the problems is that the population is growing faster than the production of food supply. Then he mentioned the author’s opinion by indicating that the growing population reduces food supply and agricultural industry, and afterward it causes diseases because of food scarcity. Further, based on Ibrahim, the growing population is due to polygamy. He then provided the author’s opinion that technology makes the differences between rich and poor even more dramatic, and it does not actually contribute to the African agriculture. Ibrahim supported his opinion by pointing out that he agrees that the main problem of a rapidly growing population is polygamy.

In my opinion, Ibrahim did not do particularly good or bad in evaluating his material, but he explained some thoughts regarding his topic when we threw questions at him.

From my point of view, I wonder why when I asked Ibrahim why the government of Africa did not want to teach the poor how to use technology to harvest their agricultural products, and Ibrahim stated that “ to educate the poor is capitalism.” I am also curious about what the government of Africa thought, and why technology cannot enhance the agricultural industry, and why the government does not educate poor people to use technology to produce more agricultural products, so that the poor people will not become poorer, and the gap between poor people and rich people could be decreased. Furthermore, technology will probably influence the amount of workers needed. Hence, it is the responsibility of Africa’s government to make backup plans for ordinary people, in case the technology decreases the amount of jobs which would increase poverty.

On the other hand, in Jay’s report, “Loneliness”, he mentioned that almost all the Koreans are afraid of being called “Mr/Ms. Loneliness” because they do not like people to see them as a “boring person” or as “no social activity person”, based on Jay, and he was going to find the reason in his research. Yet, he did not point out whether the phenomenon is a fact from the book or is his own opinion. He did not support his opinion because our discussion ran out of time because of Ibrahim’s report. (I didn’t even have any time to share and give my report to Jay and Ibrahim.) In addition, of course, he has not started doing his research yet, so he is not able to provide details on what he has stated.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, Jay seemed to need more time to evaluate his material because he did not give enough reasons, details or information from his book. From my experience, many of my Korean friends who went to travel alone were very proud of themselves about traveling alone. Therefore, if Koreans are afraid to be called or indicated that they are Mr/Ms. Loneliness, I wonder why many of my Korean friends enjoyed traveling alone. However, I am not Korean, so I may not understand Koreans as much as Jay who was born in Korea.