I believe that the Russian Newspaper as it is will not be as popular as an addition to Spark. So we are joining these two now. It won’t be purely Russian, just some articles will be bilingual(or so it is for this issue)

Since we don’t have too much time, till the January issue is published, for now there will only be one(but big) article in Russian – Social Networks in Tashkent, were I’m going to talk about the most popular social networks, and maybe try to understand the reasons for their popularity.

I’ll be checking the Russian part and as usual Malika will be checking the English translation of it(or I would rather say an English version, as it will be more like a separate piece of writing – translations don’t work too well)

____

MAD is canceled for this week and Hiking plans haven’t’ been set yet.

But I was talking about the check-up. So we somehow manged to get to the clinic and that’s when things got really complicated. Clinic is at the second floor. And it means a lot of stairs. 2 kids having troubles walking and one small me. I won’t talk about how we made it up the stairs, I don’t want to complain. After that things went quick. The doctor quickly look at their medical records and examined kids and after that we had quite a long talk about what to do next.

We discovered that both of these kids had operation at some point, girl – a year ago, boy – 6 years ago. The problem is is that it was all wasted and operations changed nothing, because there was no proper rehabilitation period. It’s too late to fix anything for the boy, but there is still something that can be done for the girl, but it has to be their school’s responsibility to keep an eye on it. We can only get the orthopedic footwear for this girl and maybe take a find of “guardianship” over her on a more of an official level. We can then meet with the girl from time to time and check how she’s doing and find out if she’s getting enough attention.

Now here’s our plan for the boy. He needs a tendon extension. This will put him to the hospital for around a month. After that he need to have a proper rehabilitation period, so the main condition for the operation to be done is that school will agree to take care of that – it will only require some additional physiotherapy and maybe massage. We can provide orthopedic footwear and maybe some additional financial help if it is required. But this is not going to be easy.

Now I’m working on an official letter to school arranging all that was mentioned above. I would have to then go and talk to people anyway, but we need the letter to emphasize the importance of what we are talking about.

As soon as their 2nd semester starts I will find some time to go to the orthopedic footwear shop and order shoes for the boy from last year and this new girl that had operation last year.

What I can say in conclusion is that I never expected this whole process to be that complicated. There is so many factor involved and it is such an enormous responsibility that it gets scary at times. But I see the right course of action and I know what to do next. By the way I opened the new page specifically for MAD (http://polinal.edublogs.org/make-a-difference/) and made an update for the MAD website (http://mad.site40.net/)
I’m planning to connect these two pages so people can get more detailed reports on what we are doing.

Fitness is a new program now – P90X Workout. It’s really crazy. Tiring , because it is non-stop, but really good. It works on different levels of difficulty to let us “rest” from the previous hard stage of the exercise. We will be continuously working on the different part of the body.

I had to miss the first Hiking city walk, because I was too sick during weekend, but I hope to join some more walks after the break.

Russian Newspaper will meet today to discuss our progress and plans for future. We decided that this issue will be mostly music oriented – both urban rock and rap. Tony is writing an article for the STOP column about the reasons to stop wars; Nikita is interviewing one old musician who used to play in the rock band when he was younger; I’m doing the interview with one(or two if I’m lucky) rock bands, quite popular in Tashkent. Hopefully I’ll get Timur to work on something(and he promised he will).
I’m planning to make a January issue y the end of the month after we come back from the break.

I’ve already realized that I’m well behind the required number of hours for action at this moment, so apart from joining Fitness again this Trimester(hopefully it won’t get closed as enough people will sign up), I also joined the hiking Club and joined them on their last trip to the mountains this year. I’m quite confident that in sphere of creativity I’m ahead of graphic for hours because of all the work for MUN and Russian Newspaper in past couple of weeks. By the way Veche is now available on the website starting today.
As for service, I’m sure I can keep up with the hours as the real preparation for operations will start soon.

2. How do you feel about the quality of your reflections, and what is your comfort level with this possibility?

I’m perfectly fine with sharing these reflection with anyone who may be interested in reading them, besides I already have Ms. Niederamann as one of my readers, so it’s not a problem for me to open up.
My reflection may not always be perfect, but I’m sure it’s understandable.

What I’m currently working on is trying to make their lives a little bit better. We are planning to do operation for children(8-10 year old) that can really improve their health and maybe even allow them to become a full member of the society, with no need for special care and creation of special conditions.

I also believe that showing them our care, our interest in their lives can help them understand that the world is not as cruel and indifferent, as it may seem. I hope this will help them develop a more optimistic worldview and look forward into future instead of fearing it.

In my Newspaper, Veche I also talk about some topical things – in the first issue the main article I’m investigating what is going on at the Cosmanauts Metro for ages already and looking at it as something bigger then just gathering of teenagers obsessed with extreme sports. I’m trying to argue that this is actually at that level of cultural phenomena of modern life.

In the next issue I’m planning to introduce the column “STOP!” where we will be publishing some things that we believe have to be put to an end.it will range from small things to issues of global importance, however I as an editor would have to be cautious of what I’m allowing to appear there and make sure it’s not that sensitive.

Now going back in time to the Fall Break, I’d like to reflect on the progress with first issue of Russian Newspaper. The issues is basically ready – design is complete(fonts, color schemes, format, layout, orientation, pictures etc); the headline article is done. The only thing that’s missing is Timur’s articles. Although they were due the Wednesday of Fall Break, I still don”t have them. Maybe I’m not really good at enforcing the tasks on people. But I just don’t know what else I can do. I tried to be soft and ask him in a good way, tried to be more strict, in the end I even tried shouting at him. Maybe this will work. The last due date I set for him is this weekend. If I’m not getting this articles on Sunday, we are just publishing the issue without them and start working on the new one.
Hopefully with the start of new Activities Trimester some more people will join the newspaper. It will be harder in terms of managing this group, but easier in terms of diversification of material presented in the newspaper.

In Make a Difference we had one more lesson with kids and a planning session, since it’s the fall break in local schools now. The lesson went well – we continued introducing our students to some more stories, vocabulary and grammar constructions, and asked them to write a short-store about their daily activities in class. They shared the beginning with us, so we can correct some mistakes and their homework was to finish the story.
We now have access to a really good collection of stories, divided by levels of difficulty – “A-Z reader” – and during our planning session me and Shakhruh decided on the appropriate level of difficulty foe our class and picked the story to do with them. We also started putting the lesson together – organizing the material to present to students, picking the exercises etc. We’re finishing this at home, and we’ll be ready to meet students whenever they are coming, because it seems like our session after their break is canceled due to Eid.

Spark article was a really challenging one – I was supposed to write about the dress code selectivity, but instead I turned into a small sarcastic story, really going against my usual writing style. It was difficult but now, when I look at it I really feel proud of myself, especially after seeing that it’s nor just funny to me, other people seem to like it so far.
The only problem I had with this article, that made me rwerite a part of it, was that it appeared to the reader that it appeared to be aimed at someone in particular while in fact it wasn’t. But I’ve corrected it.

This is the activity I spend the most time planning for. I’m leading it and I’m responsible for everything that will be going on there.

I spent the most time planning the first meting, which happened at 5th of October. I was surprised that it worked out nearly perfectly on time. Despite some distractions during the meeting, by the time it was finished we have discussed and decided on everything I’ve planned to discuss – format, layout, columns, ideas for topics for this particular issue, some of the ideas I had for the design and the little organizational questions about the due dates for them to tell me the topic, and then to actually write everything down and send it to me to edit(wait until I edited it, and possibly rewrite some of the parts – who knows)

The due dates for articles to be sent to me is Wednesday, the 20th of October during the break, but we still have to decide on the title page and headline article, so before the issue is out we will have at least one more meeting.

Until that time I will be writing my article about the Culture of Cosmonauts with Tony and editing the other journalists works.

Fitness training

Fitness in fact requires a lot more planning and leadership than I expected. During first couple of sessions we just followed what Mr. Andrey was telling us to do. But after that he gradually made us take a higher part in leading this activity.

Last two sessions I had a part of time, when it was me leading the whole group. First time it was quite unexpectedly, so I had to think on the fly and there wasn’t too much planning involved. Here is the process of negotiations with my supervisors about whether it is fair to ask me to lead an activity without any planning beforehand =)

And here is the picture of me actually leading the Fitness Training – doing a complex of exercises on Balance.

The next training had to be the first one, when we were supposed to start our individual program – we had to come up with our own complexes of exercises with the full description. But not everyone have done it – so me and Huda have been leading the lesson for part of the lesson

Make a Difference
requires a lot of planning for the lessons – I’m trying to write everything with the approximate time I’ll need for that. Last lesson went quite well, and the time was allocated efficiently, we had 10 minutes to do some extra things and some activities that I had planned just in case.
We will be working on the plan for the next lesson over the break.