HW 40: Responding to a Podcast
“Iraqi Teens Work to Help Their Families”
Alive in Baghdad
October 15, 2007
The podcast covers the topic of unemployment in Iraq and how teenagers are getting work in order to help their families. The people that appear in the podcasts are teenagers who have gone out to get work. For example, 15 year old Hussein Kamal. In the past he has helped his father with carpentry but recently his brother has taught him a new career, furniture painting. Other teens that appeared in the podcast were also quite young and have been working for a number of years. The scenery displayed in the background does not look like anything that we are used to seeing. There does not seem to be any sort of factory that the boys use for carpentry. In one case it is some ones backyard. I found it sad to hear Yousif’s story. Because of the war he was born with a birth defect which has caused him to have many surgeries. He now is attending an agricultural school and is unemployed. I find it impressive that even with the rough life of an Iraqi he is still eager enough to get an education. Many other teens stories made their lives seem very routine and their lives seemed very hard. It seemed as though they did so much work and would not earn a decent amount of money. There was not one story in particular that I found memorable because I began to think that they all had interesting stories and were hard working teens that made a good impression on me.
