Ayiti- The cost of Life

Ayiti- The Cost of Life.

A game based on Haiti

Playing the game

Playing the game was shocking. It made me realize that the choices I was making in the game, real life people had to make also. The thought that someone might have to send their family to work even though they may have Cholera or Bloody diarrhea really makes me think. Can life really get so bad that you have to send sick people to work?

It made me aware of how difficult life in Haiti obviously is. It showed how once you are in the cycle of poverty; it is very tricky to get out of it. The game is a game of luck but you do also have to make choices, some of them cruel and difficult to make. Some decisions may kill one person but save another. For instance, someone may be extremely ill and another person very ill, you would have to send the very ill person to work so that the extremely ill person could get the treatment they need. The game showed how hard life in a 3^rd world country can be. You could be soaring one season with 500 goud then the next season only 53 goud. It’s all about choices. The choices I made were mostly short term planning and more to do with now than to do with the future.

I think health is the right strategy to use, if you can’t keep everyone healthy, they will die or will not be able to go to school or work. If they can’t work, the others in the family would be unable to go to school or be treated for their illnesses. Therefore, I chose the health strategy.

As soon as I started sending the women to school things got a little bit better because the women had much more work opportunities than men. I only really sent the women to school, I sent the men to work because they are meant to be strong enough to survive the hard but decent paying jobs such as Rum Distiller. I found that when you got an education the jobs got less dangerous and higher paying. In conclusion, the best strategy to use is sending the people to school so that they can get a better chance career-wise. I also found that getting a bike helped a lot because you could get better jobs. I decided that sending the little boy to school would be pointless because the little boy is too young to work.

I think parents choose to devote a lot of effort to sending their children to school because they want them to be successful and get good, high-paying, risk-free jobs. They probably don’t want their children to follow their footsteps because they are really struggling to survive. The sad thing is that it costs a lot of money to send kids to school so when I played, I was only able to keep one of the children, the elder boy, in school. I was, however, able to get a little bit of vocational education for the parents which helped a lot. A main obstacle that prevented me from being able to keep the kids in school was money. Sometimes you would have to send someone to hospital so the kids would have to work to pay the hospital bills. Another obstacle was health and happiness. Sometimes the kids were too ill or depressed to go to school.

I found that the situations and options in my community are so different from the ones in the games. For instance, I would never ever be sent to work until I was older but in the game quite often I had to send the kids to work.

Access to education might be a challenge in another country because it costs a lot and quite often the money the adults earn is not enough to send all the kids to school. Also there are probably not very many teachers and the teachers that are there may be not very good.

Maybe if the education was cheaper or even free and the salary for less dangerous jobs was higher, it might have been easier to get an education. Also maybe if the health was better and cheaper they would not be sick and unable to go to school. These are all barriers to development. If these basic needs were achieved, it would definitely benefit the general community and help the children get an education.

All children deserve the chance for the best life possible; I think that this is what the game is trying to say.

Information about Haiti

With 80% of its population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty, Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. The country is mostly a Christian country and the main language is Haitian Creole. Around 66% of the population work in small farms earning them very little money. Over 225,000 children have been forced to become slaves because of extreme poverty.

Haiti is home to the most dangerous place on Earth (according to the United

Nations), Cite Soleil. Cite Soleil is the biggest slum in Haiti and is home to roughly 250,000 Haitians, most of whom are living in extreme poverty.

The lives lived by the Haitians may have been made worse by the treacherous Earthquake that occurred recently.

Life in Haiti

I think that, due to the recent treacherous Earthquake that occurred, the streets will be full of scenes of devastation. I think there will be children climbing on top of ruined buildings looking for food. I imagine that it would feel terrible for them having to search and search through ruins for food. Before the Earthquake I think that life would have felt easier to the Haitians, but because of the Earthquake they spend their time praying and searching for food and their loved ones. I think that it is terrible that they should have to cope with all this.