Thursday 16 July 2015

Week of Workshops on Civic Engagement (July 13 - July 17)


We got a list of different workshops. We could choose approximately one out of three.     
Monday - (volunteering)
Our week of workshops on civic engagement began by an introductory lecture of one of the faculty staffs. Afterwards we moved to a warehouse of a local charity organization Second Harvest Food Bank, which focuses on delivering the expired or gifted food those in need. We were divided into few groups. My group was checking the date and quality of the food. We had a table for different kinds of food (milk, meat etc.), according to which we had to asses if the expired food is eatable. Then we put the checked food into boxes, which were being delivered to customers. In every box had to be different kinds of food. Later it turned out as impossible to comply with it, as we had too much of meat cans and macaroni. I have never seen such a big amount of it before. 

Too much of macaroni

Working (everybody in motion)
In the afternoon I cooked for my family a traditional Czech dish called bramborak(y). It is a potato pancake with flour and eggs, tasted by garlic and marjoram. I could not find any marjoram in an American supermarket, so I made it up by some Italian fusion, it tasted differently, but everybody liked it. I do it almost every time I am abroad. It works, people love it.


Cooking
                                                                             
Tuesday - (Social Movements and Authoring Action)
We had a workshop Social Movements by Nate French, who works as a teacher at Wake Forest. We did types of social movements and different stages of their development, emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization and decline. He was giving us some examples of movements and we tried to sort them out according to what he had said before. He let us to discuss why some movements failed, and why some were successful.

In the afternoon a writer and a filmmaker Nathan Freeman came to have a workshop on creative writing. He is also a founder of Authoring Action, which focuses on working with youths and developing their artistic abilities. This enthusiast explained us what riff in poetry is. We all tried to write something, he gave us feedback then. Afterwards we tried to write a piece with emphasis on the art of expression. We are going to present them the next week.

Nathan in his yellow T-shirt speaking
Wednesday (Performance at Retirement Home)                           
In the morning we had the second part of Social Movements. Today it was more creative. Nate divided us into three groups. Every group was supposed to find one social movement and connect the facts found on the Internet with the things he taught us yesterday. Groups chose Femen, Marijuana Legalization Movement and Fair Trade. We tried to explain why Femen failed and Marijuana Legalization Movement succeeded.

Afterwards we all went to a retirement home Salemtowne. Some of us prepared performance. There was singing oriental songs by girls from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey, solving Rubik's cube in extremely short time or beatboxing. Then we started informal talking to open-minded and nice retirees.

Thursday (Campus garden, Workshops and Bowling)
We divided into two groups on Thursday morning. I was in the group which went to help out to campus garden. The second group stayed at WF and tried to prepare for tomorrow's afternoon with children from Boys and Girls Club. The garden was nice, North Carolina is fertile and besides tobacco suitable for many other plants. They try to be as organic as possible, but the way of gardening, they consider as something revolutionary, is not very different from the way practiced by majority of Czech gardeners. We did not take of plants, unfortunately, but building a new compost was quite fun as well. After few weeks I finally did some manual work, which I after so many classes needed.


The compost is built
                                       
Afterwards we had a set of few workshops. During Fundraising BFTF alumni Matt and Sarah explained us different ways of getting funds for our projects. If you have a good idea, it should not such a big problem to get money from the U.S. Government or the EU.

I went to Len to discuss a logo of my project called Projekt Kepler. He came up with a great idea. There will be an old portrait of this man with a small retouch. He will have a shirt with palm leaves instead of authentic clothes.
Projekt Kepler...


In the evening we went to play bowling. I was against this idea as I do not like bowling, but here I am supposed to do what the others want. Everybody here is afraid of our safety so we must move just in the bigger groups. However, eventually I enjoyed, I was still excited due the successful creation of my logo, so I had a lot of energy and did not have any problem playing this interesting game.

Friday
I enjoyed a workshop Civic Journalism by a young Bulgarian journalist Mladen Petrov. He explained us principles of pitching a story to medias. If you do it well, there should not be a problem to publish some of your articles in the news. 

We can apply for faculty lunches with different teachers of WFU. There always few of them every day. A small group fellows go to the lunch with one staff and informally discuss whatever they want. Today I had a lunch with Barbara Lentz, who teaches law and in her free time also works for humanitarian organizations in Nicaragua. It was great. We discussed many things and she gave some useful advises about our projects.


Faculty lunch
                                       
We had a bit of time to prepare some games and entertaining introduction of our countries for a group children coming to spend their afternoon with us. We wasted all the time for our preparation, but our improvisation worked. They did not pay a lot of attention to countries' presentation, but they loved the game on imitating pigs. I liked how impudent they were. It was fun when 10 years old guy asked for the numbers of 18 years old girls and then one of them said that he would have liked to play with her boobs. 

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