Choosing to Participate:
A Social Justice Service Project on Sustainability

         I am very relieved that this is all over. I can’t believe we have been doing this for four whole months! I think that our workshop did pretty well. I ran “Make Trees, Save the Planet!” with Brianna and Amy. The second workshop was a lot better than the first because we learned what to do and what not to do from the first workshop. Most kids were accepting and they tried hard, but of course there were the few who were fresh and had an all- around horrible attitude. The finished product was not at all what I had expected it to be, but it was still good. The thing is, without knowing it, Brianna, Amy, and I had had different visions of what the final product was going to look like, even though our descriptions to each other seemed the same. 

          One thing that confused me was that I had previously thought that each group was going to be presenting exactly what they had done. For example, I would have had to show the signs I made for the sales I did for malaria, and Julian, Aaron, and Zaran would have had to present whatever they did to fight malaria. But we never did that.

          Lastly, I loved the cake! It was good to have a celebration after so much hard work.

Yesterday and the day before, I made popcorn. Today I will make some more. I am aiming for a $100 profit, but by the way things are going, that doesn’t seem likely. I have twenty bags left to sell. Some of my money is lost. But who knows? maybe people will make big donations. This is probably my last donation to Against Malaria, at least for this project, so I want to make a lot of money. I made a lot of bags. I probably spent 7 hours in total popping the popcorn.
            Because this is the third time I have sold food to people around the school, I will be able to sell the popcorn much faster. I found that if you let people know that the selling is for a good cause, they often donate extra money. I think I will buy some from myself, as well.

I interviewed Lucy, my sister’s nanny, about malaria. She grew up in Honduras, where malaria was a big issue. My mom and I worked together to figure out how the tape recorder worked. When we finally figured it out, I sat down and called Lucy on speaker phone. The interview went for about 15- 20 minutes. I would say that it went well, but she may not have been the best person to interview because she has never gotten malaria, and she knows no one personally who got malaria or died of it. Also, she doesn’t remember that well from when she was little and she lived there. She did remember some things about malaria, though.

Lucy said that what she knew about malaria was that it was a very bad disease that gets started by a mosquito. It bites you, and you get very, very, sick and sometimes die. She said that she remembers it being a big problem when she was little, even though she wasn’t directly affected by it. She said that she knew a guy that worked in the sanitation department there. He would go into villages and talk to people about how they could prevent getting malaria. He would also go into peoples houses and spray their houses with insecticide so that the mosquitos would die if they came inside. I asked her how it was for her now in Honduras when she goes there for visits. She said that she and her son, Justin, have to take malaria pills in order to be safe. She said that she remembers her mom talking about it being a big problem now. I also asked her what she knows about the epidemic going around now. She said that she saw a big thing on the news about how it is a huge problem in Brazil.

That was what Lucy could think of or remember about malaria, and it was alot. She definitely helped my expose, even if someone else may have been able to help more. Interviewing helped the cause of defeating malaria because now, I know a little more about it, and when I tell others about the problem, I will be about to tell them more. The more people know, the more they will be inclined to do something about it. I think that next, I will either sell more stuff, or hand out flyers around the school talking about malaria and what the reader can do to help.

Today, I sold popcorn with Maya. Yesterday, I made the poppcorn with my mom. Today, Lucy made some more. I brought it to school. I made $60.00. Some people made donations. My mom was able to sell two bags of popcorn for $5.00 each. Someone made a donation of ten dollars. I was amazed at how successful this popcorn sale was compared to the bake sale. I think it was because popcorn isn’t messy, I got there earlier, and each bag was only one dollar flat. It was easy for people to buy. And the fact that it was air popped with butter and salt was probably appealing, as well. The popcorn was actually my moms idea. I was really surprised and really happy that I made so much money so fast. My goal for future sales is to make all the prices easy to pay again and get there early again. This worked out really well. I now have two more posts left before I am done. My next post will be the interview for the expose, and the one after that might be more popcorn. I’m not sure. I didn’t really learn anything about the organization’s inner workings or the environment, social justice, or sustainability, but I did help people with malaria. I will send a check for 70 dollars over the weekend to Madness Against Malaria. What I learned about people skills and work skills today is that if you want people to buy something, you have to find a way to say something appealing fast, before they walk too far away. That way they stop and say, ‘ wait, maybe I do want some air - popped popcorn with butter and salt……’ 

This was definitely a success.  

This reflection is about a conference our group had with Rob Mather, the head of the Madness Against Malaria foundation. Our group consists of Zaran, Julian, Aaron, and me. The whole time of the conference, I felt interested because he told us the story of how Madness Against Malaria came to be. The conference went well. No one was rude. This is what he told us: to make a long story short, he heard that Malaria was the #1 killer of pregnant women and childeren under 5 all over the world. He wanted to do something about it, so he started organizing swims. The first swim, he only raised $1/4 million. But the second swim, he exceded his goal of $1 million by making 1.3 million dollars. There is another swim this year. After the first swim, he decided to make what he was doing into an organization. What I learned about the organization’s inner workings is two things. The first thing is that Rob Mather runs the whole thing, and he only has a few helpers. The other thing I learned through the conference call with him is that you need a special liscense to receive donations and distribute them for good causes. Robert Mather had to get one of those. A goal I want to set for my next session is to be very productive in whatever I decide to do. I have no questions for my teachers of group members. What step I have to take now is to think of what I am going to do next. I want to remember everything I have written here for the Day of Learning presentation. I cannot put up photos because my camera broke :(        

This is a reflection on my first bake sale. My progress of it can be seen in my log. I worked with Hannah S, Sophie, Amy, and Brianna to bake, frost, and sell the baked goods. I think that this whole thing went really well. Aside from the fact that some of the brownies were so crumbly we couldn’t sell them, everything was okay. At first, when I was selling everything, I thought I wouldn’t even have enough money to pay my mom back for all the ingredients! I was really scared. But I ended up making about a $100 profit! The whole time of this project I felt fine and content. I had a great time making all the things. What really surprised me about this was how many people there are in the lobby as soon as school gets out. Everything just dissappears immediately.

Something I learned while doing this project is that greasing the pan when baking is totally necessary, and if you don’t you only get half the cake out. I also learned that random strangers get surprisiongly annoyed when offered baked goods for good causes. What I learned about sustainability with this project was that although it can sometimes be really easy to make a difference if you just put in a little effort, it can also sometimes be really hard. Adding up all the time, I think I worked on this for at least eleven hours! I did not learn anything about the organization’s inner workings from this project. A goal I would set for my next work is to get more helpers ahead of time because everything seemed kind of last - minute to me. I don’t have any questions for anyone this time. What other steps I need to take for Madness for Malaria is to think of more ideas of what I can do to raise money besides bake sales. I might do one more bake sale, but I want to do other things as well. I want to remember everything I am writing here for my Day of Learning Presentation. Unfortunately, there is no other material that I have to post, because I currently have no camera.