Xin Chao
A few of the Global LAB Club members and Ms. Lob at this week's afterschool meeting.
At today's meeting we brainstormed the best ways to approach a community service project in Vietnam for next summer. We'd like to work with an orphanage or a medical clinic or education project of some kind, donating supplies as well as our time and labor and any skills we can offer.
We agreed that the best way to do this is to contact some organizations in Vietnam and introduce ourselves, asking them if there is anything they would like us to bring them or other ways we might be able to be helpful. This way, we know that we won't bring things they already have or offer things that they don't really want or need. So we've drafted some letters with all this in mind and hope to start some conversations with potential partner organizations in Vietnam.
We agreed we will each bring some photos of our life and families in the Bronx to share with new Vietnamese friends and we'll also bring some disposable cameras so we can give the orphans we meet a chance to document their lives and share their stories with us.
We also talked about ways to make the relationships we develop when we are in Vietnam become ongoing. Maybe we can exchange emails, invite our new Vietnamese friends to post here on our blog, and possibly even have them visit us in the Bronx someday.
We started thinking about different ideas for raising money to make this trip happen and came up with some ways we can begin fundraising online and by writing letters.
Mr. Eastman taught us a few words in Vietnamese, like how to say hello/goodbye (xin chao) and counting to three (mot, hai, ba) and showed us some Vietnamese money.
Ms. Lob helped us figure out how to convert US dollars into Vietnamese Dong using fractions and proportions--a real world use for our math skills! Today's exchange rate is $1 = 16,998 Vietnamese Dong.
The Vietnamese New Year called Tet is coming up at the end of January and we're going to try to find out if there are any events happening in NYC that we could attend to celebrate the Year of the Water Buffalo.
We set our next Global LAB Club meeting for 6pm on Dec. 3--parents will come so they can ask questions about this program and meet Mr. Eastman. Ms. Lob will bring Vietnamese food so we can have dinner together and start learning more about the kinds of food we will be eating on the trip.
We agreed that we would each post a picture of ourselves here along with a few words to introduce ourselves so stay tuned for that as we figure out the technology of blogging!
That's it for now.
The Global LAB Club Scholars @ BCSM