How does the media shape our view of the world/ ourselves?

The articles that I read were "The Rwandan Girl who Refused to Die", and "The Children of the Rwanda's Genocide. In comparison to the articles, "The Rwandan Girl who Refused to Die" impacted me the most compared to "The Children of the Rwanda's Genocide". This is because the first article was the story of Valentina and the killings of families in a church. It surprised me how horrific and inhumane people are by the massacre of children! It's upsetting to me how much they have witnessed and how few survived the massacre. I feel really bad for the children because they are forced to be independent at such a young age while here in Canada the time we actually leave our parents and be independent is probably 20! And here we actually have parents to guide us, support us and be there when we need them. But its disappointing because we don't take advantage of the fact that we do have our parents here and unlike the children in Rwanda, they witnessed their parents get brutally murdered and have to live with that for as long as they can survive.

The way that the author portrayed the articles was that they tried to hook you with the setting and environment that the children live in. They used symbolism and imagery and explained the places that the children lived in. For example: "When I first saw her nearly three years ago she seemed more shadowlike than human, a skeletal apparition lying on a camp bed in a country where corpses littered the roads and fields." The authors set the mood of how they felt about their experiences and portrayed it in their writing. I truly did feel how painstaking it was for the authors to witness the children and even interview them as well.

The articles are different in a way that in the first article, the author actually heard the experiences first hand from the girls experiences and even from one of the murderers of the massacre in the church. But in the second article there wasn't as much feeling and pity as there was in the first article because I felt like it was just all statistics in comparison to the actual experience of the children. The way that the authors conveyed evil was in the text the first article included one of the murderers and viewed his point of view to compare to the child's view of it all and it showed that he was forced to murder all those people to protect his family. In the second article the author portrayed evil through all the facts and showed how inhumane the murderers are and made us feel pity in the children for how much they have to go through life without the support of the parents. "The family structures that used to support the child no longer exist," The most evil thing that anyone can do is take away the parents of a child, which is what Rwanda armies and militia did, which is why we have all been contributing to help the children by developing foundations such as UNICEF.

The media shapes our view of the world to be just like how Canada, Europe or the USA is. They don't often or ever portray the 3rd world countries, which they should. Here in developed countries, we take advantage over our lives from food to the people who love us. The people in Rwanda have lost all the support of a home and a stable family but we here complain about our parents and the food we eat. The children of Rwanda would give anything to see their parents again and will do anything for food. Overall we should appreciate the fact that we could go on the computer and do our homework on there and that we actually have an education with desks in classrooms and whiteboards to write on. But we don't, because the media is corrupting us and instead we could be contributing to help the Rwandans.