I know I’m over a week late in blogging about the afternoon sessions at the YouthCamp, but it was a hectic week last week and with the YouthCamp being so memorable, I figured I’d be able to come back to the YouthCamp, which I’m doing now.
Most of my afternoon on the second day of the YouthCamp was taken up with a coordinators meeting for the Youth Action Fund, so I was only able to attend three sessions.
The first sessions was on the visual presentation of information, which was offered by Hernan Bonomo, who works with me here in New York. Hernan is a gifted graphic designer and highlighted a few techniques that could be used to make it easier for people to understand the message you’re trying to get across. Any of the few people who read this blog can see, I am not particularly talented when it comes to design, and really appreciated much of what Hernan had to say. His demonstration of a couple of presentations that he had put together was inspiring, but at the same time I couldn’t help but realize that as much as I liked what Herna was saying and understood the importance of it, I realized that making good presentations is easier said than done.
The next presentation I sat in on was on the condition of Romanian children left behind when their parents leave to work abroad. The presentation was made by a colleague of mine who work at OSI-Romania. She was quoted in a front page story in the New York Times entitled “In Romania, Children Left Behind Suffer the Strains of Migration.” The articles sites “researchers with the Open Society Institute” as saying that over the last three years 14 children left behind have committed suicide. My colleague was upset that the Times quoted that statistic since she insisted that it was untrue, and that she did not feel that the conditions of migrant children was as bad as was presented in the Times. Given that there an estimated 350,000 children in Romania whose parents have left them behind while they seek work elsewhere, it occured to me that the Times’ article author hadn’t done his homework. I checked on the World Health Organization‘s web site and quickly found that fourteen suicides among a population of 350,000 was well below the national average. Regardless, however, of what the suicide rate is among the children left behind, it simply can’t be a good thing that there are so many children not being brought up by their parents.
Recent Comments