Personal Narrative: Copper Sun

Before coming to kents hill, I had one view school. It's always been something that I dreaded and something I couldn't wait to be done with. Moving around from school to school never seemed like it was helping and I was falling into a deeper pit each time. After starting at a new high school freshman year, I finally thought that things might change, but that was far from what happened. Every day was unfufulling with school days consisting of crowded classes, drugs, and racism. I wanted out but I didn’t know where to go, and that’s when I made the decision to come to Kents Hill. over the summer before coming here I made a ideal version of what I wanted this school to be and although it turned out to be far from my made up version, I can say

I knew they were usually treated like property and not human beings, but I never knew they had to go through so much. We did several activities with Copper Sun including found poems, character mandalas, and essays, but the main thing I took from it was the found poems. After we read Copper Sun we moved on to another, althgought none less terrible topic by reading Sold, a book about a young girl who lives in poverty in nepal and gets sold to a brothel by her stepfather. She thinks she is going to the city to be a maid and work so she can send money back to her family, but really she is forced into horrific situations and was constantly forced into doing sexual acts against her will. In the end of the book a group of americans comes and saves her from the brothel, but not everyone's story ends as well as Lakshmis. Gender violence and sexual slavery have definitely come a long way since it first started, but the battle for gender equality and women's rights is far from over. In the united states alone, over 800,000 people are raped or sexualy assualted each year. After we read Sold we watched a documentary called Girl Rising which is about a girl from Cambodia who was the victim of slavery. After being freed from the prison she had been living in, instead of taking her experience and turning into something negative, she is resilient and now liberates other girls who are in a similar situation as she was