The Tunnel of Oppression

When I went through the tunnel of oppression last week, I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  Only I and one other girl went through in my group, and at the beginning a volunteer handed us nametags to give to each other.  Mine said “failure” and hers said “zero.”  It was awkward having to put such a mean label on a total stranger, but it made me realize that even though we don’t go around sticking tags on people, we all mentally do this every day.  Just seeing the word “failure,” and thinking about being labeled that way made me uncomfortable, which I think was the point.  

The first room we went into was about Hindus in Bhutan, who are being oppressed by their Buddhist government.  There were pictures of starving people and piles of people’s belongings thrown into the streets.  I learned that there are quite a few Bhutanese refugees living in Fort Worth.  It made me want to get involved, since there are people living right here in Fort Worth that I could help.  I am not always able to donate money to charities overseas, and it is also hard to know if the charities are actually legitimate.  I will probably try to find some more information about these people to see if I can get involved and help them.

The next room was dedicated to the child soldiers and suffering in the Congo.  We watched a video that showed many horrible images.  There were pictures of children sleeping on the ground outside juxtaposed next to pictures of American mothers kissing their children goodnight in bed.  In another set of pictures, American boys chased a soccer ball, while children from the Congo wielded guns almost as big as they were.  Even though I’ve seen images from the Congo before, it is hard to relate to them because nothing we experience in America is anywhere close to that bad.  Seeing images of happy families right next to the suffering children really put everything into perspective for me. 

After that, the third room’s topic was gay marriage.  It showed some pictures of gay and lesbian celebrities, and we watched a short video about Prop 8 and protests advocating gay marriage.  I liked this room, because since we live in a free country, it isn’t right to tell people who they can and can’t marry.  With all of the other freedoms people have in the US, I don’t see how letting gay people marry each other would change anything. 

The next room was the most shocking and disturbing to me.  It talked about female circumcision, which apparently happens in a lot of less developed countries and villages.  The walls were covered in stories of women who were forced to go through this torture by their own relatives who thought it was a good idea.  It was hard for me to read about this, and it seemed like the ultimate form of oppressing women.  All of the women whose testimonies were up on the walls said they felt humiliated by the “surgery,” and it even said men preferred wives who hadn’t been through this. 

The last room was about the number of gay or lesbian young adults who are homeless.  It is sad that people are kicked out of their homes because of their sexuality, but I didn’t understand some aspects of this room.  The statistics said things like “36 percent of all homeless adolescents are homosexual.” To me, that doesn’t seem like a terribly high percent.  I would have liked to have other statistics to compare this one to, so I could think about it in perspective...Maybe it is a lot compared to the overall number of homosexual people in the US.  I think this room could have focused on just the number of homeless children.  That seems like a big enough problem without the sexual orientation aspect.  That room was the last room in the Tunnel.  I would have liked it if there were more rooms in the tunnel; I expected at least ten or fifteen topics.

The Tunnel of Oppression was a great experience for me.  Not because I enjoyed learning about other people’s suffering, but because everyone needs to know that these things happen in the world.  I am glad TCU does the tunnel, and I’m glad I was able to go through it.  It college, it is easy to get wrapped up in the “bubble” of campus life.  Even though it is often painful, it’s good for us to be reminded that, as the more privileged individuals on this planet, it is our duty to help those who are less fortunate.