Whitehead Detainment Camp

          

This is a photograph taken by Sebastião Salgado in 1995 of the Whitehead Detention Camp in Hong Kong. Whitehead, in 1995, contained about 11,000 of the Vietnamese 'boat people', who sought to escape communism by finding a new life in China (Salgado). However, because many of those who fled communism were not technically refugees but were looking for employment, they were not accepted in Hong Kong. Before it was closed in 1998, all the “non-essential welfare services in the camp” were scaled back to persuade the Vietnamese and other immigrants to return to their own countries (“Global”). Essentially, this meant that the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the unaccompanied children, and the severely depressed that the CFSI (Community Family Services International) were afforded little to no care. However, few in the camps seemed willing or even desirous to make the journey back to their former homes. Although Whitehead was closed in 1998, there are more than twelve camps in Hong Kong that are still functioning ("Global"). 

          These children, who are generally the descendants of 'boat people', often have never seen "a dog, a cow, a horse, or a garden." Many were born and raised in these camps, surrounded by barbed wire and concrete, attending school behind bars (Salgado). In this picture, the kids look like kids. Remember when you were a kid and you pretended that every fence could make a jail? If you didn't know better, these kids could almost be sitting behind a fence, telling their mothers to look, look, look at them because they knew how to play prisoner. Some of them laugh, some of them cry, but they’re just kids. Forty percent of the population in Whitehead was made up of children (Salgado).

            We can’t do anything for the children who grew up in Whitehead, but we can do something for those who have been detained in current camps. The more people know, the more they can do; if nothing else, I want to make sure the public knows about the suffering of these children.

"Global Detention Project: Hong Kong Profile." Global Detention Project: Hong Kong Profile. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.

The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.

Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. New York: Aperture. 25. Print.

South Franklin Community Center Part I

            This last week I was able to volunteer at the South Franklin Community Center just a few miles south of school. I was more than a little excited and nervous, because although I knew we were tutoring elementary school children, I was not sure how they would receive my peers and me.

Finding the center was a challenge on its own; it was located behind the central building of an apartment complex, and we were almost at a loss as to where the building was when we arrived.  When we finally entered the building, we climbed a flight of stairs that could have belonged to the average home and arrived in a large room with several tables and chairs set up, with about four children, most of whom were obviously children of immigrants, each with their own tutor.

When two more boys arrived I noticed their mother only spoke Spanish, whether because she could not speak English or because she did not want to I am not sure.  I knew her children understood her, although they did not respond with much more than a nod or two, and from my high school Spanish classes I was able to piece together what she had said, which was along the lines of, “Go, have fun and read!”

Her older son, who was about eight, went to the bookshelf and picked out a book on archeology and dinosaurs, which he promptly opened and began reading. He struggled, and his voice was quiet, with a slight Spanish accent, as he read different names of dinosaurs. He began not at the fist page of the story, but on the introduction, a page that I rarely read or even glance at. I was instructed that the children were to read for at least twenty minutes, but this boy read for more than forty-five. I watched as he improved in that time, from struggling to pronounce ‘fossil’ to sounding out with relative ease ‘hadrosaur’, a word that I am almost sure I have never heard before.  Finally, when the center was about to close, he asked, still quietly, if we could move on to another activity. We spend the last five minutes testing his speed-reading and pronunciation skills, and when he left, I felt somehow changed by this small boy.

He hadn’t said much other than his grade level and to ask if we could read this or that, and when I asked him what he thought would come next in the book he only looked astonished and said, “I don’t know…” I was thoroughly amazed by him. He had struggled so hard through his reading but had persevered, where I might have stopped as soon as I knew twenty minutes were up. His level of determination was above what I see around my in my fellow college students, and I learned from him. 

Photograph 1: Northern Mexico

I chose my first photograph because there aren’t any faces in this photograph, just some tennis shoes resting just above a speeding train track in Northern Mexico. I chose this picture because it scared me in more ways than one. What’s really terrifying about this picture isn’t that the people riding above the tracks on “the Beast” could fall at any moment or the “tiny fragments of metal thrown up by…the wheels on the track [that] can cause serious eye injuries” (Salgado). It’s not the border patrol or the wilderness or the dehydration (Salgado). All these are horrible risks, but they aren’t the worst things about this picture. The most distressing part of the photograph is that they are willing to brave all of these dangers for a chance at a better life. 82% of the ‘passengers’ who try to get into the U.S. are minors, some of whom are younger than fourteen (“Donate”). The risks are nothing compared to the possible escape.

Although this photo was taken in Mexico, the same drive exists all over the world, the drive to go somewhere better, a place they may have only heard rumors about. Everyone is willing to risk his or her life to go somewhere to live--really live. As Father Rigoni, an Italian priest serving in Mexico, said, “They are seeking the possibility to survive" ("Donate"). These migrants are willing to brave border patrols and the perils of the trip—getting robbed, raped, kidnapped or killed—to escape gangs and violence for the slightest chance of something better, and to me, it reveals just how bad their lives were (“Donate”). The real question, then, is what we can do to help make their lives just a little bit better.

"Donate." Top Stories RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2013.

Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. New York: Aperture. 25. Print.