Engaged with issues of global importance: Creativity and Service

 Amnesty International – Local English Group 

After a really enjoyable and engaging last year attending the Amnesty International local gruppe I have been continuing to attend this year.  Amnesty Internationals work has inspired and impressed me and I hope to help as much as I can this year in both the local gruppe and my Human Rights Club. 

I have regularly being attending meetings where I bring up cases I feel particularly passionate about as well as listening to other attendee's cases and projects. It is a great forum to listen to others ideas and suggestions. We bring in our letters from our Human Rights club for the local Gruppe members  to sign and increase awareness of the various human rights concerns we have have been interested in at our sessions at school. 

Other than signing letters, petitions, protest appeals and from all over the world we also plan actions, events to raise awareness in Zurich. This year we helped produce a flyer supporting a film about Human Right violations in Sri Lanka. Here is a link to the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B7dmDbmgJI and the film http://nofirezone.org

No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka is a chilling documentary about the terrible war crimes committed during Sri Lanka's horrific civil war. The graphic and attention grabbing documentary includes real camera,  phone recordings, pictures and interviews of the victims. It is a revealing insight into a conflict that was barely reported by the western media and has yet to finish any kind of justice proceedings to bring the militias and government forces to court. 

In October on Saturday 19^th, I joined Melanie and a group of Amnesty International members to distribute the flyers both in English and German. The flyers advertise a showing of the film on 2nd November. We distributed the flyers the following Saturday again to really try and bring in as many people as possible to see the film. Due to the graphic images we could only offer the flyers to adults. 

The showing was very successful and brought a lot of people in. It was truly an amazing sight to see everybody there. We helped set up a collection of signatures and donations towards Amnesty International. I have been very pleased with the success we have had this year and I hope to see more from this Gruppe next year. 

Shown perseverance and commitment with activities: Action

New Term New Running Goals

Last year I was very proud with my running success completing a major personal challenge, running the 10k Zurich City Run under an hour. This year I hope to work on another aspect of my running particularly hill climbs and further endurance. My running partner and I have set a very optimistic target and running a 15-17k run before December. At the moment I I train at least three times a week, either with my partner or alone running approximately 7 to 10km so it will be challenging to increase this but that is the aim. We will also be aiming to support our running by improving our muscle strength particularly leg exercises. 

So far this term we have had varying success with our running plan. It started off very well in September as we had very very mild weather. Melanie and I managed to easily add 3 km to our 10km milestone. We also visited the gym at least once a week to work on muscle strength. We used a muscle strength training plan which I created last year as part of my sports leaders CAS activity. It was often tough to find time to fit in runs but we were creative and turned our runs into study sessions as we recorded class notes and played them on our ipods while we ran.

We had a very busy October but with the nice weather, Melanie and I still managed to average about 14km per run. We got into the habit of running separately however as our schedules became increasingly difficult to work with.

In November was when we started to have difficulties maintaining more than one run a week. Melanie and I both had colds, the work mounted up and the snow began to fall. Our running suffered and we only managed much shorter runs of 8 or 10km. A nice change was I managed to persuade my dad to come out on a couple of runs with me, it was a chance to help him improve his fitness.

December was better we managed to get back into our gym sessions, trying out some Yoga and Pilates but also some time on the cross trainer. We managed to fit in a 15km run and hope over the Christmas holidays to get it up to 17km, fingers crossed.

Overall I am content with our progress but hope to reach our goal!

Considered the ethical implications of my actions: Service and Creativity

Human Rights Club

In September Hailey, Melanie and I were discussing reviving the Human Rights Club we ran two years ago. Inspired by our sessions in the Amnesty International Zurich Gruppe we wanted to find more time to write letters and get people involved. We wanted to put together weekly sessions where people could drop by and write letter to current human rights prisinors globally. We have been doing this for a couple of weeks and have really been enjoying this chance to research human rights victims and take some action writing letters to the Saudi Arabian Government, the Chinese ambassador to Switzerland as well as Human rights prisinors in Iran. One particular prisinor I have been writing for is Ales Bialiatski a prisinor of conscience currently being held in prision in Belarus. After hearing about the horrific human rights abuses in Belarus last year from a activitst at the Amnesty International Zurich Gruppe I have been reading a lot about the political situation there. Ales came to my attention when he won the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Award last september for his bravery and courage human rights work in Belarus which is serving a four year sentence for. 

Writing letters to governments can a intimidating task but luckily I have had a lot of experience with it, participating and organizing Amnesty Internationals Annual letter writing campaign at ICS in previous years. Writing these letters is a skill, you must maintain an appropriate resister throughout no matter how passionate or angry about the situation you may feel. It has to be heartfelt, professional and pressuring while being polite. Writing letters to prisoners congratulating them on their bravery it a lot easier and more enjoyable. What is difficult is sometimes the sense that nothing is happening from the letter writing, probably only 1 out of 10 letters we send ever even get opening. It is important to realize even a small effort is still important. If through our letter writing we can get one politician, prosecutor or official to thing twice about a particular prisoner or case we have been successful. 

Developed new skills: Service

The Duck Race 

On the 31^st of August my friend at ICS, Basia Clauer held her brilliant event raising money for Krebslige Zurich, the Duck Race. The Duck Race was created and organized by Basia herself, the race revolves around selling rubber ducks and having participants dress up and decorate their ducks. 

After participants have a duck they put, the ducks that is, into a giant pallet and finally a crane holds them over the Limmat River in Zurich releasing them to flow down the river, carried by the current. The event involves a lot of organization and so I wanted to help out Basia and her excellent cause.

 I was involved in administration of the ducks, which involved a lot of running around chasing down ducks, taking peoples names and addresses and selling ducks. I also advised participants on their duck dress up! It was a long day in the very hot sun but it was a throughrally enojable experience. Many language barriers faced me as tourists from around the world got involved, it was also challenge to use my German. Often I was doing transactions in German, while trying to take down names and addresses in English.