Back at Home

         3 months into SENIOR YEAR, and senioritis has hit the Class of 2013! College applications, college campus visits, Extended Essay, IA's, you name it and every IB kid is freaking out! But on the way we tell each other:

KEEP

CALM

and

ACT LIKE 

A 13oss

        As the school year progresses, I am keeping up with giving back to my community. As a member of National Honor Society, I fulfill my duty of showing leadership qualities and serving my community. Currently, I am helping out local non-profit organization, ACTS (Action in Community Through Service), with the help of my friends, we get together and help ACTS in any way possible. On some days we have scheduled to go to their office and help them unload goods received, then help them package the goods into bags that are given to families in need. 

link to ACTS: http://www.actspwc.org/about-acts.html

      Now, my project I did with my Global Citizen group was about education and helping Haitians educators get the right facilities and tools to teach their students. But something that I am doing at home is something small but humble and giving. Helping families have the basic food and clothing is the foundation to those children getting education and succeeding in life. 

      In the near future, the small committee we have in NHS that specifically does this service, is planning to have bake sales at school to raise money so that we can buy Christmas gifts from the lists of families that cannot afford them. Every child deserves to have faith and some fun during the holiday seasons. Thus, doing this small act of kindness will only make us better people in the world. :D

I'll keep updating you all on my small ways of giving back!!!

Me. It's What I Can Do

         As one of the presentations this slide was there and so I took a picture of it. George Clooney was the right actor's image to get me thinking! Most of the presentations that we saw were about how the individual through his/her dedication achieved their goal and made a difference in what they thought was important and needed the attention of a society, community, culture, or the world rather.

The image on the left is exactly how my group and I felt in the beginning. At first we were completely clueless, though once we got IDEAS, we became overly excited and could not decide on what topic to focus on. Though slowly, we reached to a conclusion that we were all passionate about education and how we can aide educators help or supplies to teach their students or audience. 

Once we had our topic we were at the focus stage of our project, we had converged and were on the process of diverging into the mainstream of our project, T.E.A.C.H; Teaching Educators and Changing Haiti. After this process we had started to think like our target, as in what would the educator need to complete his/her job. Thus, we used the Empathy map. With this map, we would take the perspective of the educators and see what they would feel like, what motivates them, how do they play a role in their society already, etc.

My team working on the floor plan

Once we completed that step, our Global Citizen Group was supposed to make a comic strip of our real life situation. As in what the situation is like before, what we would do to help, how we would approach them, how the process would look, and then the final successful ending, and how they community would become self sustainable. 

This is a sketch of what my group had done for the comic strip and showed how we would approach our educators in Haiti, what we would provide, then the effects of the project, and then how they become self-sustainable. 

After this step, once we completed our project, we were told to go out and vote for a project that we thought has a motive and enthusiasm to actually care for their goal for the community. Sooo, these are some of my groups' members trying to advertise for our project, as we did have the amazing Antonio Banderas as our identification for votes. 

In the end, there were a total of 5 projects that would be chosen as the top 5 and would get a chance to present the project everyone attending the conference. And this is a picture of my group and I presenting our project's floor plan and aim for Haiti! :D

It was a SUCCESS!

My Global Citizen Team is in Top 5!!

The teams were divided up to create a community and service project that they are very passionate about. My group and I chose to do our project focusing on educators.Our goal is to gife tools and proper education skills to teachers in underdeveloped schools. We have planned to initiate this in Haiti...and now it's time to present...let's see how it goes!!

Global Village

Just had an amazing time at the Global Village. Got to see cultural clothing, food, music, and amazing games!!

Inspiration :D

What inspires you? That's the question I am asked every time we have a speaker come or we are in our global citizen groups. Listening to all the speakers throughout the week, it has been repeated iver and over again to use what you love to make a difference. Meeting new people from around the world, I genuinely feel lucky to be an American. That is because there is so much diversity that there is a little bit of culture, experience, and richness from around the world! Especially coming from Gar-Field High School from Virginia...I get a small world view..there is an abundant amount of diversity there..that I never appreciated it as much until today. As an IB student I get the rare oppertunity to learn to appreciate everyone from different religions, ethnicities, caste, creed etc with ease!!! Let's see what I learn later on in the conference!! :)

Design thinking

So today we have spent the day with our group and made an amazing foreplan for our CAS project that may be developed and make a difference in the world! We had two speakers in the morning that were very inspirational!!

Global Team Goup

The first activity we did in our group was really interactive. Our first activity was about how we can make our peers' experience here better and my group made an advertisement about personalizing our name tags so that people can see what we like to do. I think my group has many ideas that once put together will make a change in the way people perceive things and maybe change their paradigms and have a better view of issues aroun the world!!! :D i can't wait to get back to my group!!