Comment Cuisiner Son Mari a L’africaine: How-to Manual or Cautionary Tale

De tous les arts, l'art culinaire est celui qui nourrit le mieux son homme. – Pierre Dac Calixthe Beyala was born in Cameroon in 1961. She was very disturbed by the extreme poverty of her surroundings. She went to school in Douala, and she excelled in Mathematics. Calixthe Beyala traveled widely in Africa and Europe before settling in Paris, where she now lives with her daughter. Beyala has published prolifically, and her most recent novel, which came out earlier this year, is called La Plantation.Beyala’s novel Comment cuisiner son mari a l'africaine appeared in the year 2000, published by Albin Michel. It is similar in structure to Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, where the narrative is interrupted by the recipes which figure in the plot line. In her book, Beyala includes twenty-four of the recipes which her heroine Aissatou prepares to attract her neighbor and compatriot, Souleymane Bolobolo. In this way the book serves as a how-to manual, as its title sugg ests, on how to seduce, marry and keep a husband by cooking for him.The book begins with a prologue in the form of a legend where a woman arrives at the remote home of the recluse, Biloa. She announces that she has dreamed of him since she was a little girl, and that she has always known that they would marry. Biloa protests that he isn't the one she is seeking, repeating â€Å"Ce n'est pas moi†, but the woman tempts him with food so Biloa admits his identity, â€Å"C'est peut-etre moi,† and takes the woman and the basket of food into his house. This, according to the legend, is how Biloa came to be a member of the society of men.This prologue does, indeed, prefigure the struggles of Aissatou, our novel's heroine, who is a une dame-pipi28 caught between her identity as a Parisian and as an African. Fed up with romantic disappointments, she has chosen her neighbor Bolobolo to be her husband, though she hasn't really even met him. Aissatou, who habitually eats only three grated carrots for her dinner, and always takes her tea without sugar in order to maintain her slim figure goes to a marabout for advice on how to seduce Bolobolo, and is provoked by the other women that are also waiting there for advice.According to them, Aissatou's problem is that she is too skinny, and they lament the fact that â€Å"ces filles d'aujourd'hui ne savent meme pas cuisiner†¦.. et ca se veut des femmes. â€Å"29 Aissatou takes this all to heart and armed with the recipes she learned from her mother and grandmother, she attacks her neighbor on the culinary front. She begins by bringing â€Å"beignets aux haricots rouges† to Bolobolo's elderly mother who is suffering from a mental illness, and then continues tempting her neighbor with other exotic and spicy dishes.Aissatou is not unopposed, however, and deals with her rival, Bijou, by again eclipsing her performance in the kitchen. Eventually, Aissatou does seduce Bolobolo, and after his mother's death, t hey do marry. But the story doesn't end here. In an epilogue, the reader gets a glimpse of Aissatou and Bolobolo's marriage twenty years later. Aissatou admits that she cooks to save her marriage, which is constantly imperiled by her husband's infidelity.But, as her mother had told her, â€Å"There comes a time when one must prefer one's marriage to one's husband,† and so Aissatou sacrifices her pride and tends her relationship in the kitchen even though she realizes that her husband is an adulterous coward. The epilogue leaves a bitter taste at the end of such a delicious novel, but it keeps it honest, and doesn't allow it to seem like the simple re-telling of the legend of Biloa. Whereas the themes of food and cooking often serve as expressions of nostalgia in other novels, in Beyala's book, food is a language spoken by the different characters.Aissatou hears her mother's voice prescribing certain dishes to mend a broken heart and other dishes to soothe herself and her fami ly, for as she says, â€Å"Ventre plein n'a point de conscience. â€Å"30Her daughter, however, doesn't initially have the same reaction when feeling low and instead she makes herself a bowl of ‘veritable soupe chinoise en sachet. ‘ This means that prior to her decision to seduce Bolobolo by cooking for him, the only cooking that Aissatou undertakes is nothing more than adding water to a dried powder and heating it up.The fact that the dried powder is identified as ‘real’ and ‘Chinese’ point to the fact that it is really neither. Aissatou is not concerned with her food’s quality or ethnicity, and cares only about its convenience and calorie count. In the course of the novel, Aissatou will give up her proclivity for these ‘inauthentic’ foods and begin to enjoy the foods of West Africa prescribed by her mother and other African characters. In Beyala’s book, African food is imbued with nearly magical qualities. Yes, it does put meat on the bones of those who enjoy it, but it also excites the senses, and inflames the passions of those who eat it.Moreover, the true connoisseurs and sages of African food are all women. Even when Aissatou goes to consult a marabout about her love life, it is the women who actually reveal her ‘diagnosis. ’ Maimouna, who is known as ‘la cheftaine-reine des cuisines† amongst the women at the marabout’s apartment says that Aissatou’s problem is that she is too thin, and that a certain spicy shrimp dish will always attract a man. Once Aissatou decides to begin cooking African food in order to achieve her goal of seducing Bolobolo, she is also able to influence other situations through her cooking.She decides to provoke a macho response in her passive male best friend and prepares a jus de gingembre, a drink formulated to send him into a frenzy of desire, just to see what will happen. When confronted by her angry rival, mademoiselle Bi jou, she cooks a bouillie de mil for her to show that she is civilized and in control of the situation. Later, angered by Bijou's assessment of her relationship with Bolobolo, she also takes revenge on him by putting a laxative in a favorite dish of his. And of course, Aissatou's prime objective, clinched by her pepe-soupe aux poissons, is to arouse an appetite for passion within Bolobolo.Aissatou is speaking through her cooking, revealing her desires and fears, using food to express those things which she cannot explicitly state. In addition to its function as a way to provoke a physical response in the eater, food acts as an important cultural identifier in this novel. Through it we see the transformation of Aissatou from Parisian, back to African and from white, back to black. In other words, she effectuates a reverse migration, and food and cooking are the vehicle that she uses to bring herself back to her roots.Though this migration is easy to track, as she embraces her motherà ¢â‚¬â„¢s attitudes toward food, cooking and even marriage, it is more difficult to find Aissatou’s point of departure. In the beginning, Aissatou’s very racial and ethnic identity is called into question by Beyala’s own publisher’s blurb on the back of the novel itself. It describes her as  « une Parisienne pure black en proie au tourments de l’amour.  »31 But Aissatou claims that her self-imposed exile in France has made her forget the fact that she is black and that she doesn’t know when she became white.She admits that she has become white by imitating the thin, white Parisian women who are, as she is, completely caught up in the constant pursuit of beauty that is calculated to please men. She realizes that she has adopted a foreign mentality when it comes to her own body image and describes herself thus: â€Å"Moi, je suis une negresse blanche et la nourriture est un poison mortel pour la seduction. Je fais chanter mon corps en eplu chant mes fesses, en rapant mes seins, convaincue qu'en martyrisant mon estomac, les divinites de la sensualite s'echapperont de mes pores. 32It is interesting to note the use of the kitchen techniques, which indicate how previously her only cooking projects served to keep her thin. She combines these techniques where she literally scrapes her body until it is thin with words like martyr and divinity, playing into the idea that the denial of food in order to remain thin is a somehow sacred task. This is a long-standing dialectic, where women align divinity and asceticism when that same asceticism really represents a societal imperative to conform to ideals of beauty.This statement is a declaration of success; she has martyred her body in order to be desirable, and therefore white. Though Aissatou admits that she diets constantly and obsessively, like other Parisian women, she also lies about what she eats, just for the sake of being cruel. When asked about her diet by an apparently jealous overweight woman, Aissatou joyfully tells her that she has, since her birth, eaten, â€Å"le coq au vin, arrose d’un bon beaujolais nouveau; les epaules d’agneau aux champignon noirs, le ris de veau a la creme fraiche et le couscous mouton a la tunisienne. 33Of course, it is completely untrue that she ever indulges in such rich food, and certainly doubtful that she ate these traditional French dishes as a child in Cameroon. It is worth noting the inclusion of Tunisian couscous with the list of very traditional French food. Couscous has entered the repertory of French foods and is a common dish, despite its colonial origins. Though one may argue about the ‘authenticity’ of a Parisian â€Å"couscous a la Tunisienne† and how it plays on French ideas of exoticism, it is undeniably a part of French cuisine.This is in contrast to sub-Saharan African cuisine, which is much more difficult to find in the capital. Though you can eat couscous in every arrondissement, you would be hard pressed to find many restaurants that serve food from West Africa or the provisions necessary to make them at home. With this book, Beyala presents a fictionalized cookbook, and if the intrepid home cook should retrace the steps of the heroine, it could even serve as a guide for shopping for the ingredients in the recipes.As mentioned previously, this book’s structure is similar to other popular novels where recipes for the dishes prepared by characters are included, like Frances Mayes’, Under the Tuscan Sun, and Laura Esquivel’s, Like Water for Chocolate. But in these novels, the recipes are most often a part of the narration itself and sometimes are even recounted by one character to another, mimicking the traditional way that cooking recipes are transmitted, orally, from one cook to another, most often mother to daughter.In Beyala’s book, which features African characters who themselves benefited from the oral traditi on of passing down culinary knowledge, Beyala’s chooses to completely disconnect the recipes from the text, placing them on a separate page at the end of the chapter, and printing them like a traditional recipe that could be found in any cookbook or magazine article. Also, Beyala’s book differs from Mayes’ and Esquivel’s because their novels are both set in a time or place that is foreign to the reader.Esquivel’s novel is set during the Mexican revolution, and Mayes’ is set in Italy, and their settings automatically place them in a foreign and/or exotic locale. Despite this fact, the reader can easily recreate the recipes that their characters make, thereby exoticising themselves by their appropriation of the foreign meal. In contrast, Beyala’s book is both more accessible in its setting, and less accessible to the home cook. Comment cuisiner son mari a l’africaine is set in the present-day French capital and is completely reco gnizable in terms of its location and lifestyle.But re-creating the recipes that Aissatou makes is nearly impossible, because many of the ingredients listed in these recipes are not translated or even described. Though it would seem that this cookbook is intended for other immigrant women to use in re-creating dishes from West Africa, the lack of information about ingredients or possible substitutions runs counter to other cookbooks with similar propositions. Therefore, the status of the book as a manual is questionable, since it is not clear that one can even follow the recipes.Beyala’s book may just be using the recipes as other novels use illustrations. They are glimpses of a foreign culture provided by the author in order to pique the interest of the reader, just as an illustration does. Beyala’s location of the text in Paris is key in the novel, because it allows her to set up a cultural dialectic between France and Cameroon. Her heroine must navigate the multicul tural space of the post-colonial capital to assess the compromises and concessions that white and black women make.Aissatou is caught between her Parisian reality where sexual value is based on how thin a woman is, and her memories of her mother's advice which promoted the importance of domesticity and especially culinary satisfaction in the life of a couple. â€Å"Un homme qui vous fait ressentir de telles emotions†¦.. merite le paradis,†34 she would say as she seasoned a dish to please her man. Aissatou imagines the questions that her mother would have asked her if her daughter had come to her after a failed love affair.Her mother would have asked if first, she had satisfied him sexually, second, if she had kept the house well, and third if she had prepared nice dishes for him. As Aissatou begins cooking savory dishes for herself her thin figure fills in with more womanly curves, eliciting pitying looks from some who think that she has let herself go, and approval from others. Race, beauty, food and sex are all locked into an uneasy correlation that she cannot accept. She gives up on the idea of maintaining a French, i. e. thin, ideal of beauty and trades it for the African ideal of sensual pleasure of food as a means to attract men.Interestingly, she does not trade her French beauty regimen for an African one. She even cites the methods that she is unwilling to follow and decides that braiding her hair, massaging herself with shea butter and pretending to be fragile is not for her: â€Å"Rien qu’a y penser, je m’epuise comme si c’etait deja a l’ouvrage. †35 This return to her roots is unquestionably problematical for Aissatou. She is torn between the two worlds constantly. For example, when she sees Bolobolo leaving the apartment building, she is struck by her sudden ‘African’ reaction: â€Å"Si j'etais sa femme, je serais restee a la maison a l'attendre. But just as quickly she asks herself, â₠¬Å"Mais pourquoi dans le partage des roles les femmes doivent-elles garder le foyer, cuisiner, allumer les lampes†¦. jusqu'a ce que mort s'ensuive? †36This is the same reaction that she has when she asks herself if she is capable of using African methods of seduction. Aissatou’s onerous task is to reconcile her African mother’s advice on how to seduce and hold on to a man with her French post-feminist questions about that role. She knows that her mother is right, and that she will be able to seduce this African man by appealing to his sensual desires and African identity.So, she picks at Bolobolo's sensibilities as an African man and critiques him for doing the marketing himself, saying: â€Å"Vous vous etes finalement bien adapte a l'Occident qui voudrait que l'homme soit une femme et l'inverse. †37In this way, she calls attention to the cultural difference in the French and African views on the traditional division of labor and highlights the fact t hat she and Bolobolo share a common culture, though they may be forced to adapt to French practices.Aissatou also seeks to call attention to their shared culture when she uses Bolobolo's mother's condition as an excuse to get involved, which she does with ulterior motives: â€Å"J'ai l'impression que mon discours est en decalage, espace et temps. Je sais que j'ai eu une reaction africaine ou tout le monde se mele des casseroles etrangeres. â€Å"38 This statement is telling because it shows that Aissatou knows that she is acting in bad faith.She knows that she has rejected certain aspects of African seduction and that she is not being honest about her intentions, but she nevertheless goes forward with her culinary seduction of Bolobolo and his mother. When Aissatou brings the beignets to Bolobolo's mother he mentions that she mustn't have anything better to do if she is cooking for others, but Aissatou reminds him: â€Å"Oui, parce que dans ce pays il faut etre vieux ou au chomag e pour se rendre compte qu'il est important que l'on s'occupe des autres,† again setting herself apart from the French and reminding him that they are compatriots.She finally gains access to his house with this plate of food. Once inside, she professes that she loves to cook and he answers that he loves to do dishes, seeming indicating that they are ideally suited for each other, but also indicating that he may be an African man, but he has adapted to a non-African setting. And this is the prime reason that Aissatou cooks, and especially why she cooks African food, to spark Bolobolo's passion for her. Aissatou cooks constantly, and she cooks the most exotic dishes and uses ingredients that she must search for in all the African boutiques of the capital.Her apartment building is infused with the heady aromas of African cuisine, which causes different reactions among her French neighbors. The concierge battles the smells of cooking with the Airwick spray, but the old lady who li ves on the first floor creeps up the steps to hover on the landing while Aissatou is cooking. Aissatou’s cooking, because it is foreign and strange smelling, makes her black in the eyes of the racist concierge and Bolobolo’s metisse girlfriend, Bijou.Aissatou decides to invite Bolobolo and his mother to dinner at her apartment, where she intends to win him over with her prowess in the kitchen, but when she goes downstairs to invite him, another woman is in the apartment with him. Unfazed, she announces that she would be happy to bring dinner down to them to enjoy together. The dinner is a success with Bolobolo but his girlfriend, a lovely metissse named Bijou, doesn't enjoy herself at all: â€Å"Je n'ai jamais aime la cuisine africaine†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ Parait qu'ils mangent des singes, ces Negres! † To which Aissatou responds: â€Å"Du serpent boa egalement†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.C'est excellent, n'est-ce pas†39Again, the food has served to bring together the African s and place them in opposition to a separate group because they share a taste for a dish that others find objectionable. Aissatou even goes further in invoking their taste for boa constrictor, because she knows that Bijou will be disgusted by this prospect. Since Bijou is mulatto and not just French, Aissatou and Bolobolo’s shared food preference places emphasis on the fact that they are from the same country in Africa and therefore share a distinct culture, and should not be lumped in with other ‘people of color. But Aissatou's main goal for her fabulous dinner is achieved after Bijou's departure when Bolobolo starts kissing and caressing Aissatou while she is cleaning up the kitchen. This woman, who previously denied herself any sensual pleasure at all from food, is altered by her dinner with Bolobolo. With her seduction of Bolobolo she acquires a new language, where food metaphors dominate the description of sex and the body. Nicki Hitchcott sees the narrator’ s almost over the top references to food to be a demonstration of cliches on which Western advertising depends. 0But at the same time, this dinner is evocative of the traditional polygamous African family dynamic, where the wife who cooks for the husband is the one who sleeps with him that night. Although Aissatou must still deal with her more powerful rival, Bolobolo's mother, she is eventually successful in seducing and keeping him with her culinary talents. By the end of the novel, Aissatou's transformation is complete. She does experience uneasiness when it comes to her own motives and doubts regarding her role in what Hitchcott calls ‘postnational’ France, but Aissatou settles on using cooking in order to maintain her relationships.She has gone from being a self-described white woman who viewed food as a ‘fatal poison' in the matter of seduction, to using food as a tool to accomplish her goal of seducing Bolobolo. She now sees food as a positive, unifying for ce: â€Å"La nourriture est synonyme de la vie. Aujourd'hui elle constitue une unite plus homogene que la justice. Elle est peut-etre l'unique source de paix et de reconciliation entre les hommes.  »41And in this novel, cooking can also reflect passion, love, comfort, anger and civility.Food and Aissatou's deft manipulation of people through her cooking give her power that she doesn't have otherwise in French society. As Bolobolo’s mother says in the novel, cooking is indeed becoming a rare skill especially in large capital cities like Paris because women are increasingly working outside the home, and don’t have the time or even talent to cook, since they never really learned the skills from their mothers. Even though France may be a center for haute cuisine technique, it suffers the same problems of all modern countries where there has been a redistribution of domestic tasks from inside to outside the home.Women don’t cook as much as they used to, and more a nd more people eat outside the home. Therefore, we must ask ourselves for whom the didactic element of this book is intended. As stated above, it is not descriptive enough to satisfy a food adventurer in search of the exotic and by virtue of the fact that it is written and published in France, it is clearly not intended to be used by African women. Perhaps the reader who would find Beyala’s recipes to be the most accessible are women like herself, immigrant women who might need to be tempted back to the kitchen.When this is considered along with Beyala’s problematical portrayal of marriage, the book appears as an invitation to take up cooking, not as a way to experience the exotic, but as a way to reject the Western ideal of beauty and to appropriate some power within the community. Aissatou returned to this aspect of her African heritage, because she had a specific goal in mind and felt that this would allow her to achieve it. She questions herself, her methods and he r motives all along the way, and ultimately accepts the limitations of â€Å"un bon pepe-soupe† and her husband’s monogamy.Just as she advises her neighbor whose husband has begun to stray from the conjugal bed, she doesn’t reproach Bolobolo and accepts his infidelity, knowing that eventually, he will return to her. She rejected the literal and figurative hunger that she experienced as a ‘negresse blanche† and chose the culinary tools that allow her to make her husband happy, even though she knows that he will sometimes hurt her. Beyala’s heroine fully understands the limitations that she faces in a Paris, and negotiates an identity through her cooking that she can live with.

Life After Death

Life after Death. Daniel Yashinsky 16/09/2011 Death is a word that someone never likes to hear but questions that always come to mind are what happens after we die. Many people believe in different situations but ultimately I assume that the way we live out our life will determine our results in the afterlife. Almost like being punished in a sense it’s the way of the society to believe in morals such as right and wrong. Who or what judges the fact of where we go. Are these theories accurate or is it all just a fabrication. All in all it’s pretty hard not to think of the one thing you can’t run from. Since the moment I was born my parents have been telling me what is right and what is wrong. So if I was to do something wrong I would get punished so these morals have always been engraved in my brain. Who decided what is right and what is wrong, why do we have these morals and why do we get punished for committing so called sins? I don’t think there is a true answer for that, but people think that if you are a good human which can mean so many different things but in general if you live out your life doing good deeds that you will go to a heaven. This theory also works in the opposite way as well, when people commit sins that are against the â€Å"norm† of the society they live in then they will go to hell. This is one of the reasons why religion has been followed for so long to keep society in control according to what we presume is in control. If one believes in this then it will be easy for someone to just live their life and not fear what is beyond the threshold of death. But one question still remains, who decides our faith after death. Today I was asked â€Å"do you believe in god? I didn’t know how to respond because all I could think about was the reasoning for his asking. Did he want me to believe in god? Was he just curious to know what my thoughts were on the matter? All I know is it’s a personal question but it felt like I was being judged. I like to have my own views on things I don’t usually conform to society, almost like an existentialist. So the answer to the question is somewhat, I don’t particularly believe in god itself, but I think there is some sort of higher power. The real question is if this higher power ends up judging us just like this man did to me today. So this higher power for some odd reason gets to judge me and the rest of the world to decide if we get to go to a happy place or a sad place in simple words that is what religion means. People devote their whole lives thinking if they follow this rule their afterlife will turn out well for the rest of eternity. Now I will see beyond this and look at people who do not believe in god what so ever, so these sorts of people are condemned to live in the underworld. Now who’s to say that the way I live my life will determine my afterlife. Why should I believe something that someone has just made up without any proof? Anything can happen after you die; people shouldn’t spend their whole life deciphering the code of death. The reason people feel such a need to believe in something is because they have a fear, the fear of the unknown. When you don’t know what is going to come after you die, how can’t face those fears. I honestly believe that any of these theories can be true, but little did I know how much death plays a star role in so many people’s lives. Truthfully everyone sees death differently and depending on who you are Now life is an important thing to all of us, why waste it thinking about what’s going to happen after death. If I was to die I would like to one to judge me on the things I have done in my lifetime. This will give a meaning to my life and many other lives as well. Seeing how so many people believe in this way of life that it would be terrible not to see it fulfilled, also a something of a higher power judges us and leads us through the rest of eternity. Finally we can go against it all and say that all that happens is we rot in the ground. So for all we know life as we know it can be death without any real proof we just have theories but my beliefs will stay strong .

Eggplant The Universally Flattering Color for Every Woman

Eggplant is a Universally Flattering Color for Every Woman This season, we dare you to be fearless by adding some bold pops of color to your wardrobe. This is the perfect moment to brighten up and broaden your color pairing options since the latest trends embrace deep, daring hues. Of all the color trends this season, we easily fell in love with the rich, royal tones of purple, from amethyst to plum to lavender. The new Fresh Produce Eggplant Collection celebrates the earthy tones of this comforting vegetable, which stars in such hearty dishes as ratatouille, moussaka and parmigiana. Fresh Produce now carries more than 100 women’s clothing items in various purple-inspired hues, from a pinstripe vintage cardigan and comfortably stylish flutter dress in eggplant to a Boca pencil skirt in lilac and a soothing soy candle made from lavender and thyme. Enhance Every Skin Tone with Eggplant The combination of warm red and cool blue undertones in eggplant are flattering to nearly every complexion. This shade of purple is both boisterous and soothing, giving fair skin a healthy glow and enriching dark skin with an aura of elegance. â€Å"Eggplant is the perfect purple because it is extremely versatile, almost like a black, dark brown or navy,† notes Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute, in an article with Real Simple. Because of this warm-cool combo, more women are also able to pull off jewel tone purples. Lighter pastels and shocking neons run the risk of

The Salem Witch Trials Women s Struggle - 1142 Words

The Salem Witch trials caused the deaths of many women, but it also helped many women gain power among a male dominated society. The Salem Witch trials gave women the power to accuse other people of joining forces with the Devil, thus it also gave women the power to kill off the members of society that they disliked. However, women did not exactly have the power to accuse anyone of witchcraft, they only had the power to accuse other women of witchcraft. This caused a war amongst women as they constantly accused each other of witchcraft in order to save themselves, or in order to get rid of women who caused them trouble in the past. The Salem witch trials did not last forever, but a women’s struggle to gain power in a patriarchal society is still a problem that exists today. Witchcraft was a way for women to assert their will and power in a system dominated by men. And although witch trials are part of America’s history now, a woman’s struggle to have the same r ights as men is still an issue that continues to persist in society today. The Salem Witch trials did not actually give women power, rather it gave them the perception of power. The difference between the perception of power and real power is that the perception of power doesn’t raise the discriminated group (in this case the women) up to the status of those who discriminate against them. In other words, they don’t have any real power, for they cannot do anything to raise their own status, they can only lower theShow MoreRelatedThe Salem Witch Trials Essay1674 Words   |  7 PagesAlthough many people have their assumptions as to what specifically caused the Salem Witch Trials, no one has a definite account. One must use logic and prior knowledge to come to the conclusion and realize that multiple factors play a key role in causing the trials. 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The Golden Valley Door Of Hope Offers Testing - 882 Words

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Social Marketing Changing Behaviors for Good

Question: Discuss about the Social Marketing Changing Behaviors for Good. Answer: Introduction: The idea of organ donation involves the pledge of a person of donating his organs for medical usage or research and education after his death. As mentioned by Marck et al. (2014), organ donation largely helps in treating the terminally ill patients by transplanting the needed organs collected from the donor. On the other hand, as mentioned by Gomez et al. (2015), the organ donation also assists in the saving the lives of the terminally ill patients by developing the research procedure of their treatment. For the successful completion of this report, the author has chosen the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Australia. Being a US based NGO, Make-A-Wish Foundation operates in 45 countries for arranging experiences described as wishes to the children belonging to the age group of 3 to 17 suffering from terminal medical conditions (Make a Wish , 2017). The rate of organ donation and transplantation is lower in Australia, than many other countries (22nd) (Lewis et al., 2015). According to the report of Ralph et al. (2016), more than 12000 Australians suffers in the organ transplant waiting lists or dialysis, each year. On the other hand, in 2015, 435 organ donors gave lives to 1241 people in Australia. In 2014, total number of organ transplantation was 1193 (Hyde Chambers, 2014). However, the number of the child recipient is not clear enough. However, it can be speculated that the number of children who became the beneficiary of this service is not insignificant. Hence, it can easily be ideated that the lack of donated organs are claiming the lives of the children that could be saved. Hence, the selection of Make-A-Wish Foundation for creating awareness for organ donation can be identified as relevant. The program/campaign focus: For encouraging the Australian community for organ donation to save the lives of the terminally ill children, the Make-A-Wish Foundation is going to arrange a social marketing program. As discussed by McKenzie-Mohr (2013), the idea of social marketing can be identified as the design, execution and control of programs with the aim of influencing the social ideas and commercially spread a social message which has the potential of benefitting the individuals and society by improving their wellbeing. Here, the organization is going to conduct a behavioral campaign, which is aimed to motivate people for donating their organs after their death. In this campaign Make-A-Wish Foundation is going to show the data where the children with terminal health condition had the potentiality of living but failed to attain it, due to the lack of donors and encourage the community for organ donation with the aim of saving another life. SWOT analysis: As discussed by Brennan et al. (2014), identification of the organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats is an important part in the process of social marketing planning. Strange Weakness The organization has a huge name recognition which will be helpful in creating an effective impact upon the target community. With strategic alliance with various governmental and non-governmental organizations the organization becomes able to successfully serve its target clients. With a large business alliance and in-kind donation, the organization is successful in its operating area. Lack of serving the socially sustainable causes. Lack of volunteers or dedicated employees is weakening the strength of successfully executing the programs. Opportunity Threat As the organization working for the terminally ill children, it has the opportunity of enhancing its operation in health and child care sector. The organization can use the social media for awareness generation or collecting donations. The nonprofit making character creates threat to the potential success of the organizational initiatives. Lack of social awareness and lack of motivation in the community to serve the social causes. Figure 1: The SWOT analysis on Make-A-Wish Foundation, Australia (Source: Make a Wish, 2017) Justification of an appropriate target market: As mentioned by Lefebvre (2013), in marketing plan, the commercial organizations generally target the most suitable audience for promoting and marketing their products. In the social marketing strategy selection of target market is also of the same importance. As discussed by Evans-Lacko et al. (2013), market segmentation can be done depending on the demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral factors. For successful and effective execution of this selected behavioral campaign, the organization has chosen the educated Australian belongings from the urban areas mainly from the age group of 20 to 50. Influencing the youths will create a sustainable impact for the initiative. As mentioned by Burchell, Rettie and Patel (2013), the people need to make understand how the organ donation can be helpful in medical sector. Moreover, people may have some prejudiced idea regarding organ donation. However, it will be easy for the organization to influence the people who have a certain level of education and hold a non superstitious view of life. Moreover, the organization can go for targeting the people who are extraverts. As discussed by Luca and Suggs (2013), the motive of being famous can drive them to act in favor of the campaign message. Marketing mix: As mentioned by Cates et al. (2014), for obtaining the social marking objective of motivating the community people for organ donation, the organizations need to create an effective marketing mix. By identifying the product or service offerings and designing the distribution channels, As mentioned by Firestone et al. (2016), product is the main offerings of an organization that the target customer is going to get after purchasing it. In the social media marketing product is the service offering that the NGO is going to offer. Make-a-wish will choose launching an online awareness and registration campaign. In collaboration with the social media plat forms, the organization can send personal message to the users saying BE THE GOD, it will be a web-link which will redirect the user to the official page of Make-A-Wish. Here, the organization will disseminate the information regarding the need of organ donation. The willing candidates will be provided some encouraging benefits from the organization. As mentioned by Lee and Kotler (2015), place is the platform from which the targeted customers are going to collect the product or the service offering of the organization. Here, the organization will go for launching the program in the social media sources, as it is the largest modern platform to address the young generation. The registration form will be available in the social media pages of Make-a-wish. Here, the organization may select using the Facebook pages or the Twitter accounts. In the context of social marketing, price is the cost that the organization is going to bear (Bakan, 2016). For executing the program the organization need to collect donations from the business alliances of the organization. Moreover, it can collect the donations from the social media platforms as they are going to launch the program solely on the web-pages and it will increase the time the users spending of Facebook and other social website and thus increasing their income. Being a reputable organization, Make-a-wish Australia can go for collecting donation from the international organizations working on the health sector or for the cause of organ donation. Here, the organization can also collect donations from the celebrities. Promotion: As mentioned by Andriamalala et al. (2013), promotion helps the organizations to communicating the message of the marketing plan to the target audiences. In the social media marketing, promotion can be identified as the use of various commercial promotional methods like advertisement, direct marketing or sales promotional method for communicating the social message and encouraging the target audience to behave in favor of that message. Here, the organization can select various strategies. Celebrity endorsement: as discussed by Bakan (2016), a number of empirical cases has identified that influencing the celebrities to support the social causes is typically helpful in attracting the attention of the communities. Here, the organization will engage the popular film stars and singers for supporting the cause of organ donation. However, it can be a bit () for the organization. Hence, the followings will simpler to use: Direct marketing: the organization is going to send personal invitation to every Facebook users and the followers of the organizations twitter account. By communicating directly to the users the organization will be able to make more effective communication with the targeted people (Lee and Kotler 2015). Sales promotion: here, the organization can select encouraging the behavior of organ donation by alluring the target audient with the awards like mentioning the name of the donor in the organizational website and providing personal mail of appreciation to them. On the other hand, the business alliances can also help the organization in this regard (Firestone et al., 2016). The company can go for making alliance with various popular brands, and the registered candidate will be provided certain level of discount from this brand. With such a tangible motivator the organization will be able to encourage more people for organ donation. Attention-grabbing message: For attracting the attention of the target customers the marketing teams select promotional messages. Make a wish can select the following attention grabbing message: Evaluate the effectiveness of your message: The message has a both a curious and direct approach to the target audience. As the target audience is the educated young demography, this message will catch their attention and they will go for visiting the page of the program. Moreover, the mysterious approach of the message with a web-link will surely catch the eye of the young generation. Conclusion: In conclusion it can be said that the social marketing of make a wish foundation needs to motivate the young people for donating the organs. It will support the organizational motive of serving the children in need. However, this project will be able to provide a focus on the sustainable services, which the organization notably lacks. The organization has chosen the social media platform as it is the easiest way to address the largest number of the young generation, which is the prime target of this program. The organization can hope to increase the number of registration of the organ donors with this social media program. References: Andriamalala, G., Peabody, S., Gardner, C. J., Westerman, K. (2013). Using social marketing to foster sustainable behaviour in traditional fishing communities of southwest Madagascar. Conservation Evidence, 10, 37-41. Bakan, J. (2016). Social marketing: thoughts from an empathetic outsider. Journal of Marketing Management, 32(11-12), 1183-1189. Brennan, L., Binney, W., Parker, L., Aleti, T., Nguyen, D. (Eds.). (2014). Social marketing and behaviour change: models, theory and applications. Edward Elgar Publishing. Burchell, K., Rettie, R., Patel, K. (2013). Marketing social norms: social marketing and the social norm approach. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 12(1), 1-9. Cates, J. R., Diehl, S. J., Crandell, J. L., Coyne-Beasley, T. (2014). Intervention effects from a social marketing campaign to promote HPV vaccination in preteen boys. Vaccine, 32(33), 4171-4178. Evans-Lacko, S., Malcolm, E., West, K., Rose, D., London, J., Rsch, N., ... Thornicroft, G. (2013). Influence of Time to Changes social marketing interventions on stigma in England 2009-2011. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 202(s55), s77-s88. Firestone, R., Rowe, C. J., Modi, S. N., Sievers, D. (2016). The effectiveness of social marketing in global health: a systematic review. Health Policy and Planning, czw088. Gomez, M., Mccaughan, G., Glanville, A., Northam, H., Weinman, M., Myerson, B., ... Pussell, B. (2015). A Liaison Between Business Leaders, Transplant Specialists And The Community To Lead Changes In The Organ Donation System In Australia-the Outcomes Model. Transplant International, 28, 275. Hyde, M. K., Chambers, S. K. (2014). Information sources, donation knowledge, and attitudes toward transplant recipients in Australia. Progress in Transplantation, 24(2), 169-177. Lee, N. R., Kotler, P. (2015). Social marketing: Changing behaviors for good. Sage Publications. Lefebvre, R. C. (2013). Social marketing and social change: Strategies and tools for improving health, well-being, and the environment. John Wiley Sons. Lewis, V. J., White, V. M., Bell, A., Mehakovic, E. (2015). Towards a national model for organ donation requests in Australia: evaluation of a pilot model. Critical Care and Resuscitation, 17(4), 233. Luca, N. R., Suggs, L. S. (2013). Theory and model use in social marketing health interventions. Journal of health communication, 18(1), 20-40. Make a Wish |. (2017). Makeawish.org.au. Retrieved 8 February 2017, from https://www.makeawish.org.au Marck, C. H., Jansen, N., Neate, S. L., Dwyer, B. M., van Haren, F., Weimar, W., IJzermans, J. (2014). Comparing organ donation practices and rates between Australia and the Netherlands to detect best practices and areas for improvement. Organs, Tissues Cells, 17, 175-183. McKenzie-Mohr, D. (2013). Fostering sustainable behavior: An introduction to community-based social marketing. New society publishers. Ralph, A. F., Alyami, A., Allen, R. D., Howard, K., Craig, J. C., Chadban, S. J., ... Tong, A. (2016). Attitudes and beliefs about deceased organ donation in the Arabic-speaking community in Australia: a focus group study. BMJ open, 6(1), e010138.

Welcome To Disneys World Essays - Kingdom Hearts Characters, Scar

Welcome to Disney's World Disneyland, Disney World, and Euro Disney sound like magical places, places that conjure up only fond memories and images of the true ?American' culture. Disney has taken this culture to all corners of the world showing the wonders of our great society, right? Disney's movies are some of the top grossing films, the toys are selling off the shelves, and if you look at bus full of preschoolers, a large number of them are bound to be wearing a piece of clothing donning a Disney character. The hand of Disney has grabbed hold of our children, but what do we really know about this stranger? Disney is a large multi-national corporation with its eye on financial success. This success drives this company to exploit the resources and people of other nations while maintaining an image that is respected within the American society. Not only does Disney exploit other cultures, it also produces films, supposedly idealizing ?American values', that consistently contain racism, sexism, homophobia, an d ethnocentrism thereby exploiting our own. Sweat-shops are not a new issue in international business. We, as North Americans, have become painfully aware of the exploitation taking place in numerous counties. However, it is more disturbing when a corporation that has established itself on its values and a commitment to children is paying twelve years old girls seven cents in developing countries an hour to make pajamas for twelve year olds in North America. The hypocrisy in this situation is painful. A company that is teaching our children values is practicing business transactions that are immoral and unethical. Corporate Watch revealed on their website that in Thailand, Disney contractor The Eden Group, fired 1,145 of their own workers in order to take advantage of lower cost subcontractors, 10 of which were found to employ child labor. It was also shown that Disney is supporting the Burmese military dictatorship as it attempts to protect a factory, of which 45% is owned by the state, that produces its clothing. These types of business activites are not uncommon. However the public has become skeptical of most multi-nationals, but not of the American sweetheart, Disney. The business activities are certainly a major concern, but the message within the Disney productions perhaps has a larger consequence in our society. What is Disney really telling our children? Disney's films repeatedly reinforce the oppressive status-quo by placing the hero or heroine in the upper class of the society by constantly casting the roles the heroes with predominately Anglo-Saxon American type voices. The villains, therefore, must be of a different ethnicity. Recently the Arab anti-defamation league filed suit against Disney on grounds that the Arab representation in the films are always villainous, negative, or absurd. What kind of associations will children make when they are constantly exposed to stories placing white, upper-class Americans against the uneducated, power-hungry, impoverished minority? Disney also has the habit maintaining the patriarchal ideologies in our society. In almost every film, the female heroine must ultimately be rescued or reunited with her ? prince charming'. The women must be beautiful and desired by men. After experiencing a feminist revolution and a constant struggle to achieve sexual equality, should Americans still allow their children to fall victim to these images of the old sexist and patriarchal ways? To further explain the implicit messages within Disney's films, one may look at the blockbuster hit, "The Lion King." This movie exemplifies the ?values' supported by Disney. First, the establishment of the status-quo is evident in the opening scene with the song "The Circle of Life" where the animals all accept the hierarchy of their society and understand that they are to be ruled by the lions. These lions are seem to represent the upper-class of American society as the voices given to these characters are overwhelmingly white "American" voices. The only exception is the voice of King Mufasa who is played by James Earl Jones. However, Jones has overcome racial boundaries as he is readily associated with CNN and other non-racial voice-overs. The servants to the lions have various accents such as the monkey played by a British actor, Rowan Atkinson. If the rulers are clearly portrayed as white, upper-class, Americans, the lower-class villains must be