Here is what the room looked liked when we arrived. We got to hear different people speak from different countries and 2 people talk about their life in homeless shelters.
For this fieldwork we went with the other poverty group. In this photo are two of the students in the other poverty group smiling.
Here is a photo of the ticket we received before we went into the UN. After getting our ticket we had to go through security and we were finally in.
Both of the poverty groups got the chance to go to their first field work together. For our first field work we went to the United Nations to participate and hear a big conference about ways to help eradicate poverty in our country. While we were there we got to listen to many people from different countries come participate by giving speeches about their countries and poverty there.
What really surprised me was when some people who were living in shelters came to these meetings and were brave enough to talk about their experience and what they wanted to happen in the near future about poverty. While I was there and was listening to this one girl tell us about her life being an only child with her mother living in a shelter, it made me feel really sad because it must be really hard for her mother to try to do whatever it takes to make her daughter happy. There was this one part in her speech when she talked about how she was really self-conscious about what her friends might think of her if she told them that she was living in a shelter. She also talked about times when she did tell her friends they started making fun of her and teasing her. Sometimes she skipped school because of what might happen.
For me because it was my first field work my goal was to try to get a better understanding about what poverty is and how it does in fact affect many people all over the world and in our country. When we went there everything I expected from my group did happen. Everyone was being respectful and many were taking notes and by doing that we were able to figure out what our group wanted to narrow our project down to: families and children in poverty in NYC.
Something I think that motivated me was after hearing all the speeches and just hearing this one teen and this man with two children made me think more about getting involved and taking action to make people more aware. I think the next step for my group is to find volunteer opportunities to help others, like a soup kitchen or helping take care of children by doing something creative with them or just doing a food drive. I think something else we might do next is to try to contact “Homefront” because they seem like a really good organization we could work with. On this trip I think I was well behaved and really enjoyed it very much. Something I might have done differently is take more notes. I personally feel like I could have done more, but overall I enjoyed the trip very much and learned a lot.
