Hey it’s Yee and Sam! Today we had an awesome session where we talked about capitalism and poverty. We had some yummy Filipino food made by Kendra and Jhanelle. We had sinagang- a sour soup filled with shrimp, cabbage, tomatoes, and bitter melon. We also had bilo-bilo, a sweet dessert with ube, rice balls, coconut milk, jackfruit, etc. As we were enjoying our food we checked in with our name, gender pronoun, and the question “what does money mean to you?”
After we had finished our food and tidied up the room a bit, we got slips of papers and markers. On this slip of paper we answered the question “why are people poor?” and we could include a sentence or just a word that would describe it. After we shared out our ideas, we got into groups based on common thoughts. For example, all of the people who thought that the reason people are poor is because of their lack of something got into one group. The groups were government, history, lack of something, and the 1%. Then Caitlin wrote down our groups onto a poster that had 4 baskets on it. A person from each group shared out why they thought that their idea of why people are poor was most relevant and then we received…. THE HEART STICKERS!! <3 With the heart stickers in hand, we voted on which idea we thought was most relevant by sticking them to the basket on the poster.
Afterwards we began an activity where each of us were in five new groups. Within these groups we received a family profile scenario. We were given an annual income which we had to distribute across the family’s needs by purchasing certain needs on a given list. All five groups had different amounts of money. Afterwards we shared our scenarios with the entire group and if we made the situation work with the money we had or not. We then got our hour of random shenanigans where we could either do zumba, be part of the cleaning crew, or just chill and do your thang boo boo.