Alex L wondering what human rights actually are

Last weekend, we attended a Human Right’s workshop hosted by the Africa Unite Organization. I had no idea what to expect for that weekend, but all I wanted to get out of it was some basic knowledge on what Human Rights were, how they are being violated especially in South Africa and America, and how I can further educate myself to address violations of human rights in my own communities. Not to be Debbie Downer, but none of my expectations were met. The coordinators were very well prepared with multiple activities for the group to do while interacting with other people our age from other places in Africa, but personally I didn’t gain much from those activities because I felt a lot of them didn’t seem relevant to Human Rights at all. For example, we did a very long activity that involved breaking off into groups and discussing a scenario in which different countries were fleeing Earth and wanted to move to a different planet to survive. Each country had a different situation regarding their status on that new planet; one had already landed, one was on their way but didn’t inform the other planet, others were about to land on the planet but in an area that couldn’t sustain life, etc. Our job in the group setting was to come up with a plan (as a country) as to how we were going to make rules regarding the other countries landing on the planet. Somewhere along those lines I’m sure it related indirectly to the Human Rights topic at hand, but I simply didn’t see the relevance of the activity and just wanted to gain better insight on Human Rights as a whole. On the other hand, spending time with other people my age from different parts of Africa was extremely interesting. Having conversations with them opened my eyes to social and political issues different countries face, in comparison to America and South Africa. Again we split into small groups and had a country we needed to learn about in Africa and later on put on a skit about it. My country was Zimbabwe and one girl in my group was from there and taught us everything about it and putting on the skit was actually very fun. Overall, I would rate the weekend as being decent because even though there were aspects I wasn’t particularly fond of, spending time with different people and learning about different countries made up for it.