Diary Entry About Guluband

Dear Diary,

At the Sibi Fair, Dadi did something that made my heart feel like it was “crumbling up inside me like a burning piece of paper.” (page 62). I am trying to forgive father but I feel that without Guluband, a piece of my heart is missing. I hope that Wardak is not hurting him. Dadi was talking to his Baluch friends and they said that the Iranians and Arabs like to sacrifice the camels for the feast of Eid(page 45). The thought of Guluband ever getting killed makes me sick to my stomach. I hope Mithoo is okay back home. I am wishing that he didn’t forget me. He is only a little baby. I can’t wait to see Mama and Phulan when I get home!

Sincerely,

Shabanu

 

This is Shabanu. She is the daughter of Dalil Abassi and she has a mother as well. She has a thirteen-year-old sister and she is married to Murad as she has come to age. She is also a nomad so she lives in different parts of Pakistan before she is married. She has an aunt and two little cousins. She also has a dog named Sher Dil and a camel named Mithoo. She takes care of all the camels and goes to the Sibi fair with her father to sell them.

How to Survive a Sandstorm by Shabanu

We just had a really large sandstorm cross our camp. The winds were blowing hard and whipping our skin. Even in the safety of our mud hut, dust still got in and made our throats as dry as the desert sand. I am so happy that we had shelter but this is what you should do in case you are outside in a sandstorm.

Step 1: 

Put a chadr or turban over your face so that you are protected and the sand doesn’t go into your eyes, nostrils, or mouth. (If you are outside, make sure to have a lantern so that you can see your way through the storm) “With my chadr over my face, I can open my eyes enough to see the haze of the lantern in Dadi’s hand, the light reflecting from the dust in a tight circle around him.” page 111

 

Step 2:

Try to find shelter. If you see a small rock or an abandoned jeep try to hide behind it to make sure no flying objects hit you while the storm passes. If there are no possible shelters around, crouch down in a little ball to minimize the chances of getting hit by a flying object.

 

Step 3:

Get to high ground. The sand always goes into the dunes and low to the ground, so the storm will be less forceful at the top of a hill. Look for high ground if you can find a safe, solid, high point, but only if the storm doesn’t have lightning and there is no danger of being hit by really heavy, flying piece of debris. If you have a camel, have it sit down and press yourself against its side so you are safer from flying objects. Camels are well adapted to surviving in dust storms.If you’re in sand dunes, do not seek shelter right on the leeward side of the dune. The high winds can pick up huge amounts of sand very quickly, and you could find yourself being buried in the sand.

 

Step 4:

Wait out the storm

 

This is Shabanu. She is the daughter of Dalil Abassi and she has a mother as well. She has a thirteen-year-old sister and she is married to Murad as she has come to age. She is also a nomad so she lives in different parts of Pakistan before she is married. She has an aunt and two little cousins. She also has a dog named Sher Dil and a camel named Mithoo. She takes care of all the camels and goes to the Sibi fair with her father to sell them.

For this poem, I was inspired by the weather on my birthday. In early November, you can tell that it is still fall because the leaves are falling. By the last day of November, you know winter is coming. The process of writing this poem didn’t take that long because it is a haiku. This is actually the first and final draft. I didn’t find anything very challenging but if there is one thing I could change it would be to make everything rhyme. I hope you enjoy my poem!

 

Late November

Leaves on the sidewalk

The wind is getting colder

Winter’s in the air

 

Above is my Plague Letter. In Humanities, we had to write a letter to a friend or family member about the plague. I wrote to my mother. I was the princess of France and I was suspecting that the plague was coming. I wrote a letter because I was going to run away to the mountains. When I was writing, I had to constantly remind myself to not use the word “got” and also to say that I had the plague because if I had it, I wouldn’t be writing a letter. I had to talk about the plague so I wrote that I had a friend in Germany who was also a princess. Her father had the plague so she described the symptoms along with the dreadful flagellants. This post shows that I know a lot about the plague and how the symptoms play out. I didn’t have any goals that had to do with writing.

Something I’m proud of is my Thanksgiving Piece because I was really descriptive in my writing. I learned that I used a lot of words over and over again. How I can continue to do my best work in the future is by using more juicy/descriptive words.

 

 

Something that was a bit challenging was my Parzival Essay but I’m still very proud of it. One reason I thought that was challenging was because I didn’t want to repeat my sentences in each paragraph. I learned how to back up my thesis statement and how to write a proper body paragraph. How I can continue to do my best work in the future is by doing the same thing I am going to do for my Thanksgiving Piece.

 

When we read Beowulf this quarter, we had to annotate. Here are the three things that we used to annotate: We would write a chapter summary on the first page of the chapter. We did this in case we needed to use that chapter for a project, if I read the chapter summary, I would know what happened. We would also underline important parts. If there was a new setting or character, that would be a good thing to underline. The last thing we would do it circle and define words. If there was a word we didn’t know, we would circle it and then look up the definition in the dictionary and write it in the margins.

I think that annotating is important because you can learn a lot more things than if you just read the book.

One thing I’m proud of is how I underlined a lot of important parts.

One thing I want to improve on is defining my words.

This was our last year at Ashokan and I am so sad! This year was very fun! Something that I did that was interesting was blacksmithing because I had never done anything like that before! Something that I learned was that a beaver house is called a beaver lodge. This year was different than last year because we did different activities. It’s sad that we aren’t going back next year but I can’t wait for Williamsburg!

 

Something I’m really proud of is my Grendel poster. There were eight groups of 2-3 students and we were all assigned characters from the book Beowulf. I am really proud of this project because I drew with great detail and paid attention to the internal and external characteristics.

One thing that I found challenging was the creative writing pieces because some of the prompts were really hard to relate to and that was hard for me to write about something that I can’t relate to.