HW#42 The Third and FInal Podcast

http://www.gabcast.com/casts/8538/episodes/1196706498.mp3

I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks Again For Listening.

Sincerely,
Rachel

Hw#37 My Second Podcast

Hope u enjoyed my first podcast here is a second one, Mine is Episode 29
http://www.gabcast.com/index.php?a=episodes&query=&b=play&id=8538&cast=51002&castPage=&autoplay=true

HW#36 Podcast on Baghdad Burning

http://www.gabcast.com/index.php?a=episodes&query=&b=play&id=8538&cast=49823&castPage=

This is the link to my podcast. I hope you enjoy it

HW# 35 The End of the Blog as we Know it!!

Dear Readers,
I have learned a lot from maintaining my own personal blog for the last 13 weeks of class. Mostly I have learned how easy it is to blog in the first place. I thought it was going to be a hard process which would take a long time but I found it very fun and interesting. Many of the homework assignment have allowed me to expand my knowledge on the world around me and how greatly everyone is affected by everyone else. I hope people will be able to learn a lot from my posts and my blog. I hope that they will take into their own account and look up and discover some of the topics that I have written about in my blog. I feel the best work that I posted on my blog had to be the letter we had to write to Riverbend, the author of Baghdad Burning. I really enjoyed this assignment because I was also able to voice my strong opinion as well as use the information I read in the book. I think I will keep my blog, when the class is finished but I’m not quiet sure what exactly I will write in it. I find it very fun and interesting; blogging that is and I think it will be a very new and exciting way to communicate with people. I would also like to thanks my readers.. if I have any for putting up with my crappy spelling and sometimes my fragment sentences. Hope you enjoyed what you read and will expand your education in some of the topics discussed in my blog.
Sincerely,
Rachel

HW#34 Gold and the Date Palms

Golds role in the family savings in Iraq is that gold is the family's savings. It's been like that since 1990 beause the Iraqi, which was $3 kept fluctuating like crazy (Riverbend,100). Because of this many Iraqis transfered their savings into gold so that the value wouldn't change. Right before the war most Iragis pulled their money and invested in gold. Gold in Iraq is called zeeneh by the local women (Riverbend,100). It is used for show and also is greatly used when families are in financial trouble. So gold is very valuable because it is the family's life savings. So when Riverbend's aunt is freaking out so much that the Americans would come and raid the house because it is her life savings!!! Much like gold, date palms are greatly teasured by Iraqi citizens. Date palms are important to Iraqis because they like "an oases in the desert," they allow the Iraqis to hope for good times (Riverbend,103). The palm trees are also very useful as they are beautiful. They can be used for making a syrup called dibiss. This is eaten with rice in some places and eaten with bread and butter in others (Riverbend,104). Another item that can be produced by date palms is vinegar which is called khal in Iraq. Every part of a palm tree can be usefull to an Iraqi citizen therefore they treasure them very much. Now with the cutting of the date palms in Dhuluaya many citizens are at a lost, and are afraid of the repercusions.

HW #33 Education Podcast

The podcast that I decided to watch was “Challenges at a Girls School In Baghdad.” It is part of a series called Alive in Baghdad Life from Iragis to you and it was published on May twenty-first in 2007. The link to the podcast is http://aliveinbaghdad.org/2007/05/21/challenges-at-a-girls-school-in-baghdad/ if want to check it out for yourself. The general topic of the podcast was about the struggle of getting the children there safely and being able to hold a normal educational practice. In order to hold a regular schedule all the girls need to be able to make it to every class and because of the war going on around them it is very difficult to have this happen. So many of the teachers just teach the classes as normal even if multiple students aren’t there. This though allows those who didn’t get to school that day to fall behind and defiantly affects their grades and work. Many different students and teacher appear. One teacher had a red shirt on that had white stripes on it. She also was wearing a white hijab, red lip stick and a gold ring. She had very small eyebrows and was sitting when she was talking to the camera. The scenery inside and outside of the school was very plain. All the walls on the outside were plain white as were the inside. There wasn’t a lot on the walls, no posters and pictures as there would be in an American school. The only thing I saw on a wall was a map and it was painted on the outside wall of the school. There are many things a viewer will learn from watching this podcast. First off is that fact that Iraqi education is struggling but you will also discover that dispite all odds many young girls and children want to go to school. I think this podcast makes a much bigger effect on people than the videos they show us on the news and such. It is more direct to the problems in Iraq and not just more footage on bombing and attacking. I think this podcast is very memorial because of the children’s faces, they look so eager to learn and yet they are so crippled by what they lack in tools and time.

HW #32 Aquila Al-Hashimi

Aquila Al-Hashimi is a women who was attacked on September 20th 2003. "She lives in Jihad Quarter and was leaving for work when two pick up trucks with armed men cut off her car and opened fire on her and her brothers" (Riverbend,75). Armed men ran out of their homes to see what all the comotion was about, and started fighting with the gang. Aquila was taken to the hosiptal she was in a very ctritical state but she was abole to stablize. They brought her to the Al-Yarmuk hospital and later transfered to the Bagdad Airport hospital. She was wounded in multiple spots on her body such as: foot, shoulder, and stomach. In this entry Riverbend stated that it was very sad that Aquila was wounded because she was one of the "Decent members of the council." This showed that no matter who you are as a women you are still in extreme danger. Aquila was involved with many foreign affairs and lived in Iraq. The gang that attacked Aquila wasn't known so Ahmad Al-Chalabi began an investigation. But like many other people he had his biased opinion on who was at fault. He thought that Saddam and his loyalists were responsible for the incident. Aquila had many enemies who didn't agree with a women being able to have so much control so many of her fellow council men opposed her. One of the reasons they didn't like her was that she was also a prominent part of the former government and that she didn't ware a hijab. There were many differnet views on who was truely at fault for the attack but no one has been arrested for theie actions.