Well it's a new school year already! Time flys when you are busy!
I apologize for not writing in the blog during summer, but I didn't do any volunteer work as I intended to, I just worked as a chaperon instead.
But now it's time to start volunteering again and I really need to get ideas straight for this year in order to finish of strong.
Last Monday Miss Amy took us on a hiking trip. It was a good time to spend time with my classmates and reflect. Part of the activities was that everyone had to get a piece of paper and each paper had a different jobs/ activity that one had to do throughout the entire hike. My was caregiver (or something like that) and my job was to make sure that everyone was doing okay through the hike, make sure that everyone had water and so on. I honestly think that I didn't do that bad, but I could have been better. At first I was just listening and checking on people's water bottle to make sure that they had enough water. Then about halfway through the hike a avalanche of thoughts came into my head regarding CAS, and then I was tired as well as my classmates so I stopped checking on everyone elses I tried to figure out my thoughts.
This year for CAS I have two option. The easy way or the more complex way and honestly I want to do both but I know that I won't have the time. The first option is to continue with Vianney's mom, Marie-Celie, and the Instituto de Oceanología. I really enjoy working with the Instituto because everyone in the group is very pro active, generous and with thousands of ideas to develop. The project in which I would be helping them are the trails, which the Instituto started during the summer and I had helped at the beginning with the development of the idea. I refer to this as the "easy" because it is a project that is already set, I would just go on Saturday to help the Instituto to make the signs, clean out the trails, etc. In the other hand my other project that I have in mind is a lot more elaborated.
Last school year in the last week of school I had the amazing opportunity of going to Creek Camp in Pennsylvania along with Selene. It was a memorable experience for me because science is my passion at the same time I got to travel, visit a college and meet new people. Selene and I were lucky to go because normally the founder sponsors two students from another school in Costa Rica, Green Valley in Atenas and they weren't able to go. How Jim found us is a long and complicated story, but I'm very grateful for it. Now I'm not sure if he will still be able to sponsor more students because he is now retiring at the end of this year and is working on his own project. And after my experience at camp I really want La Paz students to continue going to Creek Camp and make connections. So my idea was to collect enough founds for at least one La Paz students, maybe two to go to the Camp and make it an annual event/price for an outstanding science student in 10th grade.
I will only have a few months, the camp is in July, meaning I will have about 8 months to found raise. The camp is a week long and not expensive, it's only a $500, but the plane tickets are the ones that are expensive.I have a few ideas like having and even like the Dart for art to found raise the money. My other idea was to ask parents from the school that own restaurant to give a percentage to the found, I would announce it to the community that way more people will go and have a larger profit. Then at the end I would set a plan so another student can take over it as their CAS project next year.
I'm really interested in both project but I just can't decide which one I really want to do. I have a feeling that I will go the more complex way a start found raising, but for now I will keep reflecting and deciding which one I truly want to do.
