China and the One Child Rule

From reading the letters from our Chinese correspondents, I have become more curious about the one child rule. Qu Meihui (Mandy), was one of the people that started my curiosity on the topic. She mentioned that she was an only child, and that her parents could not afford to have more children than one. I found this odd because, in America, we do not have to pay extra money to the government if we have more children. 
I have researched the topic and learned many different things about it. On CNN, I learned that couples can have two children if one of the parents is an only child.  Critics say this policy hurts the elderly in China because they typically rely on their children for support. Also, they say it constrains economic growth as the working-age population begins to decline.
According to Newsweek, the one-child policy has prevented over 400 million births. It started with the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1949. At this time officials counted five hundred and forty two million residents in China, which is slightly larger than the U.S. whose population was numbered at one hundred and forty nine million. In 1979, three years after Mao's death, the government instituted the one-child rule to curb China's population, which had ballooned to 975 million.

Wounded Warriors Presentation

Katie Billingsley and I worked on our project together. We researched the Wounded Warriors Project and decided that we were passionate about the military. From here, we came up with the idea to raise money toward the Wounded Warriors Project. We wanted to have a benefit where we would raffle off themed baskets. We were going to have items donated from local business, and then create themed baskets. We were hoping to get some of Parkview's after school activities together to help make the baskets. I am looking forward to having this benefit in the future.
Here is the link to the power point presentation.

Global Perspectives

I had a great time at the Global Perspectives Conference. I went to the workshop about poverty and I saw the documentary. It was really interesting to learn about all of the poverty in the world, I feel like people do not think about it as much until the information is right in front of them. I don't remember what the names of the speakers were, but they gave us a lot of information. One of the things I found interesting was the fact about the four development traps keeping people in poverty. The four traps are  the natural resource trap, land locked trap, conflict trap, and bad governments trap. On average, conflicts cost countries 64 billion dollars a year. I learned that more than a billion people were in extreme poverty, making less than $1.25 a day, out of which, more than a million of these people are children.
This workshop made me think of a lot of the presentations we heard in class. A lot of the people in our class did presentations on world hunger, and child hunger. These things go hand-in-hand because when someone is making less than $1.25 a day cannot afford to feed themselves or their families. The "call to action" is to eliminate poverty world-wide by the year 2030. 
I think this is very important that poverty is eliminated because then governments can spend their money elsewhere. There will be less need for welfare and other things like that because people would be able to afford them without government assistance. 

China Exchange

• What surprised me most was the population control laws. One girl told me that her and her sister would hide in the walls of her grandparents home when the police would come to check who was all living in the house.
• A majority of the people asked for me to tell them embarrassing stories about Brock and I, and about my family.
• At first, they compared my life to American films and then realized that it is actually nothing like it is portrayed to be.
• The letters made me feel good about myself because it was interesting to see how fascinated these people were with our life.
• I do not have any questions.
• I would like to see what they do outside of school work, so that we Americans can see that they do have fun.
• This letter and autobiography exchange was such a great idea. This is something I have always wanted to do.