Medical Teams International - Real.Life.Exhibit - L.A.

REAL. LIFE. EXHIBIT. Medical Teams International

Yesterday, my class and I went to a field work called REAL. LIFE. EXHIBIT. Medical Teams International. There, we were able to see some personal experiences on walls. Two of the walls had a light bulb that blinked every 3.6 seconds because a child dies from preventable causes. Disaster Alerts was about places that had disasters and and their dates of when the disaster happened. And it turns out that Small Pox was a disaster back in the twentieth century. It killed 300 to 500 million people. For alert times, it was the first day and first month that were critical for responding to disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes. When a disaster struck Pakistan, it killed 1,800 people, 20.5 million people were affected, and 1.8 million homes were destroyed. When Disaster Hits Home was about two hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) that were the strongest ever recorded in the Gulf Coast. They both destroyed hundreds of coastal communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Texas. They left 9.7 million people affected, 1 million people were left homeless, 1,300 to 1,600 people died, and $200 billion needed for recovery.

Children of Tsunami was about kids that have escaped a tsunami. The fake wave that I saw was 25 feet high. In Sri Lanka, the wave was 30 feet high and in Indonesia, the wave was 75-90 feet high. In 12/26/04, a 9.0 earthquake caused a massive tsunami. It took just 7 hrs for 230,000 people to die and 1.8 million people to be left homeless in 12 countries. For the Uganda exhibit, 11 million kids die under the age of 5. More than 30,000 kids become sex objects and more than 30% of the abducted kids are girls. And a 7.0 earthquake killed 225,000 people and injured 300,000 more. In the Haiti exhibit, I saw many pics of homeless people, and how they became homeless. I learned from the AIDS exhibit that aids took more than 30 million people and that 2,000 infants are infected with HIV each day. From poverty, half of the kids never reach their 5th birthday. In Oaxaca, more than 1,100 volunteers have served kids in 1991. Kids scream in pain with little medicine. In a recent year, $62 billion was spent on soda for Americans, which is $204 per person. So the next time you try use money to buy some soda, ignore the soda and use the money to save a life. I learned a lot from this place and I hope to come back again in the future.