On August
25th, 2007, Marília’s Medical School promoted its second
Target-X Day: Aiming
at Disarmament. This is a great partnership between IFMSA and IPPNW.
This year,
we wanted to reach a different target group, so instead of staying in a
shopping mall, we had two stations: one in front of the municipal
theatre, and
another one near the main bus station. Another innovation for this year
was to
talk about fire arms as well, since Brazil has a special issue with
them.
In each
station, we had volunteers who handed out brochures with information on
nuclear
weapons and fire arms. We also had some tables and chairs, and behind
each
chair we had a poster with more information about fire arms in Brazil.
On the floor, we drew a
big X with red tape, and in
its center we put a poster saying “If a bomb hit the local hospital
such and
such would be the impacts”. We had another four
posters on the floor, which represented specific
city points, displayed more or less accordingly to the position they’d
have if
the red X was a map of Marília city, and we included in each
poster what the
impact on those areas would have been, considering that the bomb was
thrown at
the local hospital (or at the center of the X). Our volunteers actually
calculated what the real distances were, looked up what the impacts
would be,
and came up with a scale for the red X on the floor. The visitors were
pretty
impressed by this.
Each station had
volunteers who told the visitors the
story about Sadako Sassaki, a girl who suffered from the Hiroshima bomb;
they explained about what the
origami called tsuru symbolizes, and taught people how to make them. We also had some mobiles
made of tsurus
ready to sell. With the money from our sales, we basically covered up
all of
the money we had used in order to do this campaign.
Some Brazilians asked us
WHY we, as medical students,
care about nuclear weapons if Brazil
doesn’t have any. Our
answer was:
- By raising awareness among our people, maybe we'll
be able to make people from all over the world aware of the damage
nuclear
weapons do, so we can count on
this domino effect to spread awareness around
the world.
- If we talk about nuclear disarmament, we're also
talking about peace promotion. So, we reinforce the
importance of a peace culture, by telling the story
of Sadako
Sassaki.
- If by
any chance there's a nuclear war, the entire world will suffer, so here
is
another link between Brazil and the nuclear weapons.
- Finally,
Brazil is a third world country, and it is unacceptable that so much
money is
being invested in nuclear weapons, and NOT in our country – as well
as in other
developing countries.
This year, we reached over 500 people from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.. Some
visitors just got the brochures, and continued on their ways, but we’re
positive they’ll at least read some information on nuclear weapons and
fire
arms, and reflect upon them. Others were really interested in our
campaign,
asked us questions; some of them even debated with the volunteers, but
in the
end everyone agreed that the world would be a much better place if all
kinds of
weapons had never existed, and that peace prevailed over violence.
