Ruby T. – 1.25.10 Positive Exposure 1st Visit

Yesterday was our first visit to our organization. We went to an organization that Violet’s mom, Miche, works for called Positive Exposure. The guy who runs this organizations’ name is Rick Guidotti. His job is to make trips to far away countries to teach people about albinism and how people who are born with albinism or other birth defects are normal and just the same as us. There is a huge population of Albino’s in Tanzania and that’s where Rick travels the most. In Tanzania, people hunt down albino’s to cut off their limbs or much worse, kill them. When we were at Rick’s studio, he taught us about what his job is and what we can do to help. He taught me that even people with very dark skin, such as people that live in Tanzania, can have babies with very pale skin such as Albino’s as long as both the mom and the dad carry it in their jeans. Rick Guidotti has a website which is: http://www.positiveexposure.org/home.html (if anyone want to check it out). We (Violet, Cheyenne, Parker, and I) were shown a very sad video about how serious albinism has become. In this video, they interviewed an Albino women who had gotten her arms cut off in the middle of the night when she was sleeping, she said, “they came into my house at about 2:30 AM and  said, ‘we need your arms and we are going to cut them off and if you scream or make any noise, we will take your children and kill them.'” Something else I also learned was the when the Tanzanians had their albino babies, they were surprised by the color of their skin so  they attempted to make them darker by sticking them in the sun, but instead, it just gave them many dark marks on their pale skin, and those dark marks were skin cancer.

I am really excited for our next visit because I feel like I want to research and learn so much more. I learned all of that and much more in the hour that I was there. I am so glad I chose this topic! 🙂