Theo and I watched a documentary called The White Helmets. It is about a humanitarian aid group that worked during the Syrian civil war. About 1,200 of them worked at 120 different locations. Throughout the war, they saved about 53,000 people, including 14,000 children. While doing this job, they lost about 130 different White Helmets. Watching this documentary has truly shown me how many people can be saved even with so few people over just about a decade. I have learned that just a couple of dollars can save thousands of lives.

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Theo and I interviewed Emily Thomas, a high school teacher at LREI about our topic Humanitarian Aid. Emily has worked with a group called Engine quite a lot, Engine is a language-help organization that helps Ukrainians all around the world with help and supplies as well as helping them learn other languages so they can live in other countries. Something that I learned was about how certain people think about war in different ways, such as how a student of hers, as well as a buddy of hers in Poland from Engine, said that people actually in a war-famished country don’t think as strongly about war and how they said it’s not “world ending.”

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The interview I had with the high school teacher, Emily, was really interesting. Our conversation was great and we discussed what it was like for people who had to experience tragedy. She told us how about her experience with Ukrainians and what that meant to her. Emily said we need to do more for people not from our countries. She also told us how her opposition to this topic stemmed from an almost poisonous fear of outsiders. We all have an almost subconscious bias towards people like us. In the media almost every day we see stories of crimes committed by people who look nothing like us. This constant stream of negative media creates a fear of outsiders whether we like it or not. What I took away from this meeting with Emily is that we should trust people from different countries, races, or sexes.

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