[Late] 4/25 reading


In Shah’s “Laotian Daughter’s” excerpt, Shah went over three examples of Laotian youth and how they were working to improve their situation through organized means.  Here I will concentrate on the first case Shah went over.  The first case was that of an industrial explosion at a Chevron facility, which caused gases to go through the air, causing a variety of respiratory problems to nearby people who were exposed.  The larger problem however was that the alert system in place was inadequate in spreading the information that residents should seek shelter.  Firstly, the automated alerts, which came through phone calls, came hours after the incident occurred.  Also, many of the elderly Laotian residents were not able to understand the alerts since they did not understand English well.  Finally, due to the explosion, the nearby school actually decided to cancel classes and told their students to return home, exposing many of them to the gases outside.  This is important because in all these cases, it seems that the situation of the people living in the town, as in the Laotian residents, were not taken adequately into account.  So when the APEN and LOP organizations got together in an effort to improve the automatic alert system into a multilingual one so that the Laotian community could more easily understand it.  I think this is important because it contrasts to some of the everyday acts of resistance in that this is an organized and a decently large push for a minority community to improve their situation.

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