Summer Charity Work + Recycling

Summer holidays have started but this does not mean that CAS is over. At least for me it doesn't. On the last day of school, Mrs Gray gave to me all the money that was raised from the summer fair and asked me to allocate it for a good cause. 

Today has been a very busy CAS day for me. In the morning, I called up the owner of the "Call of the wild" dog shelter that we have visited in december and asked her of things that were in urgent necessity. I also persuaded her to let us come to the shelter today, on Tuesday, since the visiting days was the weekend. Firstly, together with Alyona, Polina and my little brother, I went to Ashan and bought a whole bunch of things that were needed. 

The "bunch of things" consisted of: 

- 10kg of dry food

- 12 packs of buckwheat 

- 30l of drinking water 

- 15 cans of conserved food

- 40 bottles of antiseptic 

- 10 tubes of healing cream 

We then travelled to the shelter and passed all of that to the shelter keeper. We chatted for a while with her whilst my brother played with dogs. 

After waving farewell to poor dogs, I came home and had some rest and then, together with Polina only this time, we headed to the main office of the charity "Podari Zhizn'" (eng. "Gift a Life"). Polina has done some extensive research on different charity organizations and it was her who introduced me to "Podari Zhizn'". This organization mainly focuses on supporting children with cancer. Knowing the biology behind it, for me, cancer is an absolute tragedy and dealing with it is a life long struggle. It breaks my heart to know that many children have to go through it today. 

This is why I was very interested in "Podari Zhizn'" and have researched it a lot. On their website I have found a telephone number that I called today to ask about donation procedure. We were almost late but made it in the last minute. We have donated 20'000 rubbles and surprisingly it was all done very formally. We signed an official contract with the director of the organization and I thought it was a perfect evidence of CAS. I will hand the hard copy of the contract to Mr Short but I am also posting a picture in this post. 

I finished the day off with some recycling action. I have recently found out that there were several 

points in Moscow where you can sort your garbage at 24/7. If this interests you, those are your destinations:

- Sadovnicheskiy, 11

- Tatarskaya, 7

- Klimentovskiy, 6

- Ovchinikovskaya, 24/22

- Kozhevnicheskaya, 1

- Melninskiy, 6

- Talalihina, 2/1

- Tovarisheskiy, 1

- 1st Siromyatnicheskiy, 3a

As a lot of people probably know, I am huge fan of water and I drink over 6 litters of it daily. Thus it only took me a couple of days to get a whole stock of plastic water bottles that I readily recycled today at one of those spots. 

To wrap this all up, I would like to say that today has been a great day because working for a good cause, whether it is helping people or caring for environment, feels amazing. I hope that in the future there will be more people in this world who would choose to live in a collective conscious way. 

CAS Objectives: 

- planning and initiating activities

- woking collaboratively with others

- showing perseverance and commitment to my activities 

- engaging with issues of global importance 

- considering ethical implications of my actions

Crocheting

One of activities that I mentioned in my new CAS plan was learning to crochet. This is a very babushka style activity but I thought it'd be really cool to know at least the basics of it!

To pursue that activity I have started by watching various videos of Youtube and researching different styles and advice for beginners. After this I have prepared the yarn and the hook and got straight into it. 

The pictures illustrate my practicing crochet and a little final project in a form of an imaginary monster. I genuinely enjoyed learning to crochet because it was something that I have never done before and didnt think I would do either. In addition, there were several CAS outcomes met:

- increasing awareness of strengths and weaknesses

- undertaking new challenges 

- developing new skills 

Also, if you are reading this post and thinking this could be an activity for you, I strongly recommend this video to watch: 

Donations to School 4

To start off, I would like to apologize for not posting for over a month - it's been a busy month and I could not find time to post on my CAS blog. This, though, does not mean that I haven't been doing any CAS activities. 

One of those activities was collecting donations to BIS4. For their summer fair, held on 20th of June, all parents were asked to bring in any books and toys in good condition to sell at a second hand stall. My parents are too busy to find time to look for anything, so I decided to use this as a CAS opportunity. I have search our apartment for anything that could be worthy of selling, asked my brother if he didnt mind giving that away and sent that off to BIS4. 

I thought that it was a great idea to organize such activity because the funds collected from selling those second hand items were given to an orphanage and I was glad I had a chance to participate in it. 

I have targeted some of CAS outcomes as well, including engaging with issues of global importance and considering ethical implications of my actions.