Name: Oliver Eig
Social Justice Group: Child Soldiers
Date of Fieldwork: February 14, 2018
Name of Organization: UN
Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Daniel Palmer, UN Associate Political Affairs Officer
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did:
We went to the UN in New York City and interviewed Daniel Palmer.
What I learned:
We learned more about how the UN works. For example, the UN Security Counsel is important because they decide where they have peacekeeping troops and where they decide to end and prevent conflict. We learned that France, Germany, and the US have helped a lot with Children in armed conflict. The US is good because they have a child soldier protection act, where they report if certain countries are recruiting children, and if they do than they do not provide that country with military aid. The campaign children not soldiers add pressure to diplomats from different countries to prevent child recruitment as soldiers. We learned that in some countries and cultures children are not under 18, but in a lot of cases are lower because they need to take up more responsibilities. They may be considered adults if they grow their first beard or go through a religious ceremony. For a lot of people they do not think that a 15 year old is a child and they do not think that they are a child, but an adult, so they think it is normal to have them as soldiers and do so. Also, in the past weapons were heavy, so children could not carry them easily, but now there are more dangerous weapons that are even lighter than before, so children can carry them easier, which makes the option of recruiting children as soldiers even more popular. We learned plenty of other things like this that we honestly did not know before, but to name them all would be tedious and unnecessary, besides, I am only supposed to share 2-3 things that I learned.
What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:
Through this fieldwork I have learned that sometimes you hit a gem, in this case being Daniel Palmer, who, in my opinion, has been the most helpful so far, and get a ton of information when you did not expect so. He took the time out of his day to teach us stuff that we didn’t even need for our presentation and more, and enlightened us in a way that I feel that we have not felt before in any of our other fieldwork. He was also genuinely interested in what we were doing, and asked us a bunch of questions about it after our interview was over. I wish that our presentation could be longer and contain more of his information. I just thought that this fieldwork was different and felt a lot more helpful than the rest.
