First Semester Reflection

One thing I have learned over this semester is the colonization of many countries and how this affects the native people, the future of the country and government and famous conflicts that resulted from colonization. We had learned about South Africa and how the Dutch and British settled the country and caused many wars and apartheid which almost completely eliminated the major tribes of South Africa. Australia was colonized by the British and turned into a white dominated country while the aborigines were captured and attempted to be breed into white people by changing their religion and traditions and breeding them with white individuals. In America the pilgrims and other groups came to settle the land taking over Native American territory so more white people could settle. I learned how similar events occurred in each country that was colonized and resulted in almost complete elimination of the native peoples.


We learned a lot about Africa and the many conflicts that occurred there. The one conflict in Africa that interested me most was the brutal genocide between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. We debated about this and from it I learned almost every detail about the conflict. It also allowed me to see the conflict through other group’s points of view. For example the Hutu extremists group the interhamwe who were responsible for most of the killing did this not only out of anger but fear of getting themselves killed by another extremists group and the demand of Juvenal to kill the Tutsis. But they did also kill for land and money. We were told how this became one of the most horrific genocides in history and it was ignored by the UN, America and many other powerful countries. If this conflict was acknowledged more by other countries especially countries of power many of the 800,000 lives would have been spared. We watched a movie about this genocide called Hotel Rwanda. I thought this was a good movie and showed proof of the genocide well although this movie would be hard to understand without any background knowledge.


Although each week I dreaded the “weekly article” it taught me how to take good notes on articles, by using margin noting, and how to make a well written, clear article response. The articles consisted mostly of news stories about Iran and their nuclear power plants, china trying to become the world economic power over the U.S. and difficult decisions about Afghanistan President Obama had to make. After taking notes on each article we had to write a good clear response with a thesis statement and a supporting paragraph. From this I learned to delete clutter and to stay on topic and get right to the point. I learned how to pull examples from the article to support my opinion on the article.


After our debate and Hotel Rwanda we wrote a letter asking for help in Rwanda as Paul Rusesabagina. In this letter we did not write as ourselves but took on the characteristics of Paul such as using guilt and bribary into getting help.