This Saturday morning, Jasmine, Emily and I woke up at 7:30am to participate in the AIDS walk with the American University student group Women’s Initiative. Even though I was extremely tired from reading The Wealth of Nations for my macroeconomics paper the night before, I managed to get up at such an ungodly hour. We took the metro to the Metro Station and met up with a huge group of American University students. While I am aware that 1 in 20 DC adults have HIV, I was still amazed by the turnout. There were so many people (and quite a few puppies) who all donated and came out to support a worthy cause. We walked 2 miles, down Pennsylvania Avenue, turned left and passed the Capital Building, then looped back around after picking up some water from the volunteers. I must admit, I was grumpy at first, but being around so many different types of people (Emily and I saw drag queens for the first time) who have all united around helping those who desperately need aid was inspiring. And doing that in the nation’s capital where it feels like a much huger statement than if I had done the same thing in my hometown.
However, it did get me to thinking politics, as most things do, and I started to think about AIDS relief in Africa. I am not one of those people who say we should fix everything here before we help foreign countries, but I can understand why some people would feel that way. It is interesting that while President George W. Bush is generally unpopular, he is undoubtedly most popular in Africa where he has tripled the amount of money in humanitarian aid since 2001. While I am not usually a fan of evangelicals (they tend to scare me) I do give them credit for making the President more aware of the HIV epidemic. Perhaps if he had given all that money to try to end HIV/AIDS in DC, he would have gotten more publicity for it, but I do believe that Africa has been hit harder by the virus than the United States has. Needless to say, I am super pumped for Bush to leave the White House, but I do hope the next president will continue increasing aid to HIV/AIDS prevention programs in Africa.
Now for something completely different:
This minor simulation video was awful. First of all, the media center gave my group a camera with an uncharged battery. Second of all, we shot 14 minutes of footage, which took 3 hours to cut and edit and add subtitles to. And now I am still sitting in the media center and I have spent an hour and forty minutes so far trying to send the video because email can’t handle it. I’ll post the total time I have spent here when I finally finish uploading the video onto a file sharing site and sending PTJ the link. Or I’ll have a heart attack from the stress and you can check in with Matt (who has been here helping me the whole time because I am technologically deficient) to find out how long this actually ends up taking.
4 comments:
Sorry, to make ME yell in fury on the quad, I hate typos almost as much as this video
6 hours 45 minutes in the New Media Center, but we have a beautiful product!
Yeah, video editing takes a long, long time. I wasn't that impressed with any of the video production (including my own - I had finals to study for), but even the basic editing tasks of chopping up importing footage, watching it, cutting it, and composing it take a perhaps inordinate amount of time. I worked for my high school's TV news program, and though you get faster you also get pickier and learn to do a lot more cool stuff. A well produced 3 minute TV news package on a professional station probably took someone the greater half of a workday to edit.
WOOT WOOT AIDS WALK! AU FIGHTS AIDS!!! haha and wow, I definitely did not know that the Bush administration did all that much for AIDS in Africa. That's the only good thing I've heard about him in a long time! Do you know if it was actually him that did this or if this was just done during his presidency by, say, a democratic congress? I'm endlessly skeptical of Bush's ability to do good haha
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