11/12 aka my so called strife

fuck this weather. this entry won't be about the weather, don't worry. but, fuck it. warm is better.

so a weird thing happened while i was volunteering at an after school program for 1st-7th graders. for whatever reason, the woman who is in charge of the entire program decided that all of the kids needed to be shown a slide show e-mail that she received. the moral of the e-mail was to appreciate what you have because other people have it worse off than you do, etc. the pictures of 'other people' that were placed next to the pictures of more 'normal', albeit disappointed children, were that of somalian children. you know, the starving ones. the ones that look close to death. in fact, one of the photos was of a dead child but had a caption about going to bed on time. the thing that killed me was that the chain letter ended with a threat to the reader about forwarding it to a certain amount of people. as in, you'll have bad luck if you don't send this to 15 people. the other coordinators and i were in shock over what we saw/what had just been shown to 1st graders.

then i came up with the theory that the woman who had the chain letter shown is very superstitious and just had gotten e-mail for the first time, so she was taking the threat at the end of the chain letter extremely seriously and decided to show it to all of the children in her program. good thinking, lady.