Secondary Newsletter 33 – May 7, 2021

May 7, 2021 Secondary Secretary

Permaculture Donation Drive update
Service as Action update
CAS Corner by Josephe Wong
Counseling
University Counseling

Permaculture Donation Drive Update
by Manon Pecquery

Hello, Teachers, Students, and Parents,
As some of you may know the Permaculture Gardening Group did a donation event for Earth Day on the 22 last week and we are happy to announce that it was a big success and we were able to collect Rp 3,250,000! With this money, we will be able to make many improvements to our garden and start growing produce. Thank you so much to those of you who have donated money to our cause and we are sure to create a beautiful and productive garden for our community!

Service as Action Update
by Amelie von Harrach and Nadia Winkler

Panti Manuella Service as Action: Delivering the Donations

On Monday a few weeks ago we went to visit the Panti Manuela Orphanage located in Jimbaran. We went after school on Monday to deliver the donations items that we collected from the school earlier. Before we delivered it to the orphanage we reorganized and counted all the donations and counted the total number of each item. We reorganized the items into the boxes so that we know exactly what is in each box.

When we went to the orphanage we were greeted by the 25 excited children. We all introduced ourselves with our name, age, and where we are from. They were all surprisingly good at English especially the younger ones. They also sang for us and also did a dance performance for us.

We stayed there for around an hour. Around halfway through, together with the children, we brought out the boxes with the donation items. Then the main supervisor (sister) went through all the donations and explained all the items to the children and what they are used for. Before we left they sang another song for us, we took a group picture and then we left.

This experience made me feel grateful for my life, specifically when they went through the items and they saw the branded shampoo. They were surprised and grateful for pantene shampoo because they usually don’t use that. Or when the sister said that the items donated will last them a long time.

Sadly they are moving locations because they can not afford to stay in Jimbaran any longer and do not get enough donations anymore, this is mainly because of Corona. We are also hoping to do another donation, just to help them a little more, but this time we are mainly going to focus on toys and books for the kids.

CAS Corner by Josephe Wong
Learning French Language
6th May 2021

For a couple of weeks since the 22nd of March, I have been taking French classes with a tutor twice a week. It has been a really cool experience, I had some background knowledge in French since I took some lessons using the pimsleur program which is essentially an audio recording program that you would listen to every day. It uses techniques of repetition to help you remember and pronounce words correctly, and so I took a few of those lessons. Learning with a tutor makes a huge difference as while possibly I’m not learning as much as I could have learned with pimsleur as it is pretty efficient in teaching, I could ask questions that I am confused about with my tutor. I get very confused with the structures of sentences and grammar in french so asking my tutor personal questions really helps me understand the language better. After my mock exams, I plan to use pimsleur and my tutor simultaneously, so that I learn French much quicker so hopefully I will be able to achieve this objective.

There are a lot of challenges that I am facing, firstly the pronunciation of these words and understanding the structure of sentences can be difficult. For me, it helps to compare things to English and see the similarities and so that way, it is not all too different. Some words are the exact same as the words in English, some are similar in the way that they insinuate the same idea. So familiarity helps me a lot in understanding the language.

I have added this CAS experience a long time ago but I never got around to do it until late March. I didn’t show enough commitment and I didn’t have the motivation to start it. Until I started having tutor lessons was then I became more committed because for me, having lessons every week sort of acted as a push to do it; as if I was forced to do it. This helped me become more committed to this CAS experience and hopefully in the future, I undertake more challenges and add more to my schedule of learning French so that I could learn this language in a more efficient and effective way.

Some of the content I am learning

Counseling

If you are keeping your finger on the pulse in Bali, you might be hearing about teen parties that are involving alcohol and drugs, like marijuana and methamphetamines. As a parent, how do you have proactive conversations where your teen will hear you, and they will feel heard by you? I will come back to the idea I have shared before of weekly family meetings. When you listen to stories about parties or read articles about teen alcohol or drug use, bring the conversation to the table during family meetings. I include images with factual information to use as conversation starters in your household.

This article from Harvard Health Publishing shares concise, informative, and realistic approaches to starting preventative discussions.

Another factor that is important for your teens to know is the local law. What will happen to teens, especially foreign teens, if they have drugs in their possession or their system? How about alcohol? What happens to your family as a whole in these situations?

If you need support for a family member struggling with addiction in Bali, The Lighthouse in Sanur has highly qualified staff. They also do therapy for people with other mental health needs.

University Counseling

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