順天中学校・高等学校

2014/09/13

The 5^th workshop was a following workshop of the previous DEAR workshop in July, taught by DEAR (Development Education Association and Resource http://www.dear.or.jp/index.html).  In this workshop, students explored about what helping others mean in great detail.  Students will submit Student Reports after the workshop.

The workshop is entitled “Think Before You Act” and the lecturer was Ms.Nishi who also taught the workshop in July.

Students were shown a photo of a sign in Thailand saying “Please Donate”, and they were asked if the sign had a price “$5”, what would you do?  Students were divided into groups and each group discussed their responses and the reason why they chose the response.  It was very interesting to see that students had very different opinions. 

Ms.Hoshi who has experience in volunteering for 6 months in Brazil joined the workship, and she talked about his experience.

Ms.Hoshi’s group thought poverty in Brazil is serious, where fishing is flourishing, is because they don’t know how to build rafts so they don’t have strong rafts necessary for fishing.  Thus Ms.Hoshi’s group collected donation and raised 60.000 yen (it worth about 130.000 yen in Brazil) and donated the amount to the local people for the cost of building (and fixing) rafts.  However when they arrived at the country, they discovered that rafts were not the biggest problem, but the real issue was that people were selling fish to tourists at very cheap prices.

In this workshop, students had an opportunity to think about various things, for example, there are so many things they don’t know until they actually go and see the local areas, and local people misunderstood that Japanese people are rich, when donation was given.

The questions from Nick made students think: “Should we only help people who ask for help?”

For the SGH project, students will start taking actions to help people.  In doing so, it is important to keep in mind that we should always consider how other people feel and the value of the actions, and then take appropriate actions.

After the workshop, we were able to interview Mr.Nisih.  The report about the interview will be updated later.