Kanta Hara 
CSU, Chico International Student from Japan 

Kanta Hara, an international student at CSU Chico, explains that a brief encounter in the Philippines changed his life. He was a freshman at Japan’s Waseda University and completing a tour of that country when he came upon a girl, perhaps seven years old, holding a baby and begging for money. He began to question how and why this would happen. This led Mr. Hara to get involved with helping the street children in Bangladesh. He then traveled for three weeks through Rwanda and Uganda. Rwanda is infamously known for the genocide of 1994 in which 800,000 people were slaughtered by members of another tribe. As Mr. Hara visited one of the sites of these murders and saw the mummified bodies there, he thought to himself, “This world is absurd. The value of a life depends on where you were born.” In Uganda, he learned of the thousands of child soldiers recruited during that country’s long civil war and tells of his interview with a girl who was a soldier. He finishes his presentation with some haunting questions. 

Recorded: February 16, 2016