Guest Speaker

The guest speaker from Thursday's class was definitely interesting and her line of work would be one to give you an interesting perspective on life. At first I was a little confused as to what her line of work was, but when she showed us the play on domestic violence in El Salvador it clicked. She was literally taking everything we have learned in our gender and conflict class and portraying it on stage. For example she showed scenes on domestic violence, males as aggressive beings, and conflict between being a father and living a tough life on the streets of Philadelphia. What the I thought was interesting was that she used the actual people involved in those real life situations and asked them to act out their life story on stage in front of an audience. My question throughout the class was how does she get people to come and watch a show like that? For example she did a story on a homeless man who would just get passed each and every day by the general public. But when she brought his story to life, the audience was filled with the same people who overstepped him while he lay on the ground in the park, and at the end of the show they were on their feet. Also where does the funding come from for something like that? The only aspect of the class that I did not agree with was when she showed the scene of the men in prison. The way she made it sound was that we were supposed to be sorry for those men in some way. I do not understand how I am supposed to be sorry for a man who killed someone. She was trying to justify this by saying how they come from tough and violent areas of a cities, but so do thousands of other people, but they are not killing people. I was by no means going to feel bad for those men in prison even if they were not the ones who pulled the trigger, they were still involved somehow. The most compelling story was the story of the young black girl whose father was in prison her entire life until he passed away. It was sad because she had no say in the situation and had to grow up without a father because of the situations he put himself in. She made a good point when she said "how am I supposed to grieve for a father I never knew?" She understood that yes he gave her life but he was never there for her when it matter most. Overall the guest speaker showed me something that I never have heard of before and I found her line of work interesting, but also very sad.