Author: Zahara Red

Zahara Red is an alumni from the University of Michigan Dearborn with a Bachelors of Arts with a concentration in English. She is currently in the process of publishing her first novel. Zahara has been married for 10 years and has four beautiful children.

A Border For All of Us

There were a couple pieces in the interactive article  A New Age of Walls  that resonated with me. Living in America talks of walls, borders, and immigration does not go unnoticed, or without having some sort of media coverage.

What is troubling is the propaganda being spread as it relates to immigrants and security. Headlines: “Immigrants bringing danger to “Our” country,” “Immigrants taking jobs,” Immigrants causing crime to go up and taking native citizens jobs.” Well yes! This is true to a certain degree. As there is not a perfect place on Earth.

To deny people the human rights to move freely is absurd. This is why according to the article, “Younger generations are less likely to favor a wall, while non-Hispanic whites are more than twice as likely to favor it as blacks or Hispanics ” (A New Age of Walls). This makes a more visible reality. If the wall goes up the generation below me will tear it down.

The wall will not allow humans to come to a country to escape. And I get the whole ‘well there is a legal way.” But when faced with famine, persecution, rape, slavery etc. I do not know a single person who would be willing to wait until paper work is finalized. Wanting other living people to wait this period is not humane.

When we think about the reason to be rid of DACA it shows little empathy for our fellow humans, take this quote as an example;

“Thousands of migrants now live in a detention center in the Negev desert in southern Israel. Osman Mohammed Ali, a Sudanese refugee from Darfur who was living in Israel, was given two options: leave the country or go to the Holot detention center. Rather than risk his life returning to Africa, he chose the desert facility.”

What our leaders are not realizing is that the immigrants that are fleeing to our country is not doing so to take jobs, and commit crimes. They are fleeing a place of non safety in the hopes they can live the American dream. Where people are not stripped of there basic human rights. How ironic they are trying to come to America, if some only knew how our leader thinks of them. Food for thought.

 

 

Handy Dandy Tools

When you hear the word “tools” you start thinking of “masculine” heavy machinery that well does not sound like fun. But there is a light at the end of this tunnel. And that light is, tools made for the age of digitalism.

Believe it or not the first tools of journalism was a good old fashioned piece of paper and pen. That evolved into a typewriter all within the years of 1870-1970 according to Searchlight and Sunglasses .

Now in today’s era we have many tools at our disposal that allows our inner creativity to run wild.

One I will be exploring is Amara. We should also refer to this program as the accessibility Queen. In this YouTube video we get a small glimpse and a chance to Meet Amara .

With Amara, users get a chance to make their content more relatable to multiple users. Take my family, on my personal blog Zahara’s Blog I have product reviews that are sold internationally yet the language I am using is English. I write poetry that is again in English. If I was able to incorporate Amara in my blogging, I think it would make a huge difference.

This is where Amara becomes the accessibility Queen. With this program I can have subtitles from all languages with collaboration from other users to assist with translating. Now my audience has went from English American to Tanzanian!