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!