Reflection on the Past Week 8/29/10

While it’s hard to reflect on a week that was mostly settling in, the first actual class and the first Wednesday lab bother brought up new information and ideas. The PEPFAR presentation was more informative than I had been expecting. It also showed me that the U.S.’s contribution to the global HIV initiative ought to be supplemented by other countries more. AIDS is not a national issue, but a global one, and one that other countries with the funds necessary ought to take an interest in as well. A major effort is needed to make progress against this epidemic, and funding for that effort must be enough to make the eradication of AIDS a possibility. The HIV aid itself also presents many difficulties for the people trying to help those with the disease. Such a complex treatment process, in what are often impoverished conditions, must be full of difficulties and often ineffectual. Conditions must improve in those areas if headways is to be made against the spread of HIV.

The discussion of How Soccer Explains the World was an eye-opening and very enjoyable one. The vast differences between the treatments of soccer in different areas of the world, and how they tied into the countries’ own issues, was fascinating to analyze. The last chapter, about America’s difficulty with embracing soccer and culture clashes over the place globalization has in this country, was no doubt the easiest to understand and relate to. Having lived in the country and not in any other the others shown in the book, I could affirm Foer’s observations about the complexities, being an observer of those same complexities myself. However, the way the other countries’ globalization stories were presented, through the lens of soccer, gave me an idea of those countries’ issues that was far, far clearer than any direct explanations of each country’s politics could. The words of my high-school english teacher: “show, don’t tell” come back to me at this point. Foer succeeded in his object as a writer by showing us, not telling us about, the different situations in each country.