This week I attended my weekly Circle K meeting. Circle K is a student organization on campus that is service oriented. The meetings are every Wednesday in room L112. Meetings always start off the same way: our President, Lauren, rings the traditional Kiwanis International, our parent organization, bell to get the meeting started. From there, it is business as usual. We go over the many event we have coming up during the rest of October such the Strides Against Breast Cancer Walk and our club project that is our Adopt-A-Road program on Tilton Road where we have to clean up that road every so often. Then we talked about the several social events we will be hosting soon like a movie night for the club on Friday, and the New Jersey District Club Rally at Drew University on Sunday.

After handling the business of upcoming club and district events, we talked about our weekly service projects. On Mondays club members can go to a program called Campus Kitchen at Atlantic City High School and help serve meals to people in need. On Tuesdays, there’s Project Linus in which students help make teddy bears, blankets and pillow cases that get donated to several different hospitals. Wednesdays is on-campus service that has a new service project every week, and Thursday is Salvation Army where we go to the local Salvation Army and help the kids there with their homework and alsoon Thursday and Tuesday we go to Sunrise which is an assisted living facility and we go and play games and interact with the residents. Finally, on Friday club members can go to the Atlantic City Rescue Mission and help serve dinner to the homeless.

Finally, after all of this, comes the end of the meeting. At the end of every meeting we have a tradition of introducing ourselves, saying what we are happy for that week and putting some change in a plastic piggy bank named ‘Porkahontas’. This is also usually the longest part of the meeting. At the end of the year, all of the money that was collected in Porkahontas will be donated to several charities.

Overall, I really enjoy going to the Circle K meetings. It gives me a break from the rest of college life and everyone there is very nice so I always leave having had a great time. Although some of it is just repeating the same things we hear every week it doesn’t really get old as some would imagine. I also like the idea behind Porkahontas. It really makes you think of all the positive things going on in your life. Even if people in the club are having a rough week they can always find one thing to talk about to be their happy thought for the week. Circle K is definitely a great club to be in and I am so happy I decided to join.

On September 26, 2013 I attended the Freshman Convocation with guest speaker and author, Mary Roach. When I first got to the event it was a mass of confusion with everyone trying to sign the sign-in sheet to make sure they got credit for being there. Eventually, I got into the Performing Art Center and settled, but I still was not exactly sure what to expect from Mary Roach. However, as soon as she started to speak I immediately started to enjoy myself. She was funny, personable, and there was no ridiculous question she would not answer. Roach spoke at length about her books and she especially spoke about the Freshman Common Reading book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.
One thing Mary Roach said about Spook was how she never liked how she ended the book by saying “What the hell, I believe in ghosts.” She said she felt like it was a little misleading because she wanted to go on this journey to really find out if we have souls and what happens after we pass away and to end it like that was not what she was going for and most people probably did not take it in the way she had hoped, which was in a funny, humorous way. I am very sure that almost everyone in the room agreed with her that they didn’t like the ending of the book either.
Another big part of her speech was her talking about how she got into writing about things like the afterlife, and the human digestive system sex. Roach said it all stemmed from her natural curiosity. She always wanted to know everything she could know about almost everything in the world and that is what she set out to do in her writing. She would pick a topic, research it until she couldn’t research it anymore and finally she would write a book about what she discovered. That was one thing I really like about Mary Roach, is her always encouraging us to be curious and ask questions which isn’t something I see being encouraged a lot in the real world. Overall, I really enjoyed the Freshman Convocation and just maybe now have a different opinion on Mary Roach and her books.

On Tuesday, November 19, 2013 the Office of Service Learning held a showing of a documentary called Girl Rising in the Alton Auditorium. This short film followed the stories of four girls from all around the world and their struggle to overcome the obstacles of poverty, lack of education, and general sexism and oppression of women. The girls whose stories we saw were Suma from Nepal, Azmera from Ethiopia, Yasmin from Egypt, Senna from Peru, and Ruksana from India. Each of these girls has a very unique story and struggle and their fights to overcome them are inspirational to say the least.

To begin with, Suma from Nepal was born into an impoverished family and was unfortunately sold into slavery very quickly because the family needed the money to pay for her brother’s education. Suma went from master to master when eventually she was set free by a social worker who threatened to have her last master arrested because slavery of young girls was illegal in Nepal. She escaped and is now trying to be independent and help women attain equal rights in Nepal. Then Azmera from Ethiopia was around the age of thirteen and lived with her mother, father, and brother until her father passed and eventually her mother tried to sell her into an early marriage because school was getting to be too much to pay for, but Amzera and her older brother stopped this agreement from going through and Azmera was able to continue her education. Additionally, Yasmin from Egypt was living with her mom and one day she was taken by a man who promised to buy her some juice and then raped. She fought back against the man and she was brought to the police station for questioning where the cops tell her and her mom that justice may never be won for Yasmin and what happened to her because rape against young girls in Egypt is hard to prove and is, in some cases, acceptable. Senna from Peru is another teen girl facing impoverished conditions who is trying to make something of herself. Her father worked in gold mines until an accident after which her mother took his place. Senna’s father always wanted her to become something successful like an engineer so Senna tries her hardest to make her father proud even after his death. Finally, Ruksana from India is among the youngest of the girls we saw in the film and also the strongest. She dreams of better days in India and she loves to draw and unlike many girls in India, Ruksana’s father supports his daughter and wants her to be educated and to be successful. Unfortunately, the family almost leaves the city they live in for the village when their house is torn down by a brutal police force. In the end, though, they are able to rebuild their home so they can live in the city and the girls can finish their education.

After the film, there was a panel discussion that included four successful female professors, mostly from Stockton. They talked about things such as educating girls, economics, and how sexism and poverty could be helped in these countries. They said that as soon as people start realizing that educating girls is the way to a better economy and a better life, countries will find themselves in better economic states. Overall, I found this event to be very educational and something that everyone, especially all young girls, should be required to see.