Goal: To help create a child friendly and sustainable environment for patients to stay in during the recovery period after their frequent treatments. Specific: Our goal is to help set up and finish constructing half of the cancer recovery house which is called Health and Hope Oasis. Another Goal is to meet the patients before the year ends. Measurable: The goal will be achieved when we can see that the children have entered the facility and are comfortable and happy there. Achievable: It won’t be extremely challenging, but it will take some work to prepare the facility. Realistic: The goal is within my capability, resources and authority. The only obstacles and sacrifices that my group faces are the transportation to the places where we work, and I also will need to take up large portions of my weekends when I work. Timely: Many of the things we are doing are in order of the development of the facility, so our work is spread out over a long period of time.
Action Plan:
Target Problem: Children with special needs and illnesses who need a place to recover
Target Group: Children with cancer
Project Title: Wadi El Natroun. Made by the organization called Friends of Children with Cancer
Goal: To help create a child friendly and sustainable environment for patients to stay in during the recovery period after their frequent treatments.
Smart Goal 1: Prepare facility with basic needs for patients to live in such as assembling beds, providing each room with trash cans and furniture that was donated, and putting numbers on each little apartment to distinguish one from the other. Smart Goal 2: Register all employees by scanning their files and reading resumes for them to be able to work at the facility since they need trustworthy and experienced nurses and workers to take good care of the children. Smart Goal 3: Planting flowers and painting murals to make the facility look presentable and child friendly in order for children to think of it as a happy and fun environment rather than a treatment and recovery center.
Obstacles:
The facility is very far away (about an hour and a half)
The hours conflict with the distance of the center because of school, sports, and other commitments and we needed to spend large amounts of time to travel there and back.
Due to Egypt’s current situation, it was sometimes dangerous to drive the long distance and back since the facility is located on the highway to Alexandria.
Tasks to Overcome Obstacles:
We left early in the morning, and spent most of the day there in order to save time, not drive back in the dark and spend many hours there to prepare the facility as much as we could so the children could start relocating out of the hospital as fast as they could.
We found days of the week when we were free, and made plans ahead of time.
The circumstances in Egypt didn’t stop us from working on the project, and we didn’t want to start a whole new project from scratch so we found ways to help the organization in various locations in Maadi and around Cairo.
Journal Entries:
Entry One: My first time helping the center was fun. The site looked very welcoming, with murals and bright colors, and it looked like somewhere kids could feel at home, even if it wasn’t. It looked like the site would cheer them up while they were recovering from cancer. What we did was we assembled beds and did gardening. This took seven hours in total, partially because the site is very far away. Assembling the beds was pretty easy, and it was nice seeing the difference we were making. We assembled around 40 beds by the end, and that could’ve taken a whole day for just one person to do, so it was nice to know that we helped make it easier for the workers. After we finished assembling, we went outside to prepare the ground to plant flowers. The area we were supposed to clean was sand, and it was full of all sorts of things, such as bottles, pieces of plastic, and a lot of rocks. We raked the sand for a couple of hours, and we felt pretty accomplished. You could see that the sand was cleaner, and I could picture how nice a garden would look there. On this first visit, there were not kids there yet because the facility was not ready, but it felt rewarding to know I helped speed up the process by working with my group there. I think that when the kids are able to get there, they will really enjoy it. I want to go back to the site again when it is finished to see how it all turned out.
Entry Two: Another way my group helped the cancer recovery center was scanning files. The file we scanned were those of men and women who wanted to be employees at the facility. There were hundreds of files, so the one lady who worked in scanning clearly needed some assistance. When we scanned, we spent around five hours on it. Each file was between 20 to 50 pages long, which included photos and application forms. To scan each file took somewhere around 20 to 30 minutes. While I scanned, I looked at some of the faces of the new employees, and they seemed like people children would be comfortable around. Scanning was pretty boring, and it got more so as we went on for more hours. But when we finished, I was really proud of what we had done. We had each completed about 10 to 15 files, and since there were three of us the first time, that is around 30-45 files. If it had just been that lady working on the files alone, there would’ve only been a maximum of 20 done. We really helped her out. I feel like doing the scanning helped me learn something about service. I learned that just because you are not actually at the site, or with the children, you are doing something for them. We were sitting behind desks doing paperwork, and I didn’t really think we were being that helpful for our cause. But when I think about it more, we were being very helpful. In every job, no matter if it is being an director or a musician, there is always someone doing all the paperwork and goes unnoticed. And even though no one thinks about them, they are what is necessary to the development of whatever job you have. We were making sure that there were employees at the facility, because if we had not done that, then it would take longer to get all the people to work there. I’ve learned that everything counts.
Entry Three: On our first visit to the facility, we were driving along the road and I noticed that there was a sign for the site coming up ahead. The sign was in Arabic. I asked the organized of the project why there was no English sign, and she said it was because no one had donated one. I knew this was an opportunity for service. A few weeks later, my group got together and got supplies to make a sign. We copied down the logo and made it colorful and easy to read. We made sure that the sign looked nice, because we wanted it to be a representation of how nice the site was going to be. The reason I wanted to have an English sign was because when we were driving to the site, I realized I was the only Foreigner. This made me feel that the site was limited to local help, and I thought that if it wanted to get bigger, they needed more people to help, and some of them could be foreigners. If we want people at CAC to help, I wanted them to feel like anyone can help, even if you don’t speak Arabic like me. What this was teaching me was that I don’t always have to take direction, that sometimes I can think of something on my own. I thought that this would be a good idea for a project that would help out the site, and the organizer thought so too. Now, I am more confident with my ideas, and will make sure I say them out loud so they can happen. Service projects aren’t just something you are told to do. People can conduct their own projects and they can be just as helpful. This has inspired me to do more service projects in my free time, as in over the summer. I can even do something small, but it will still be benefiting someone.
Entry Four: One of the other ways my group has helped the facility was to paint numbers that would be outside the doors to differentiate the houses and rooms from each other. What we did was we got shaped wooden blocks, and each block was a different number from one to nine, and we first painted them white. After that, we traced the cartoon number onto the block. We later painted each number, and we painted them all different colors. The artist who was helping us said that we need to make sure you only have one of each color on the same number. I assumed he just wanted to make the site more colorful, but when I asked him, he said that he wanted the children to learn colors. I thought this was a great idea. And along with learning colors they also learn numbers. Most of the families probably wouldn’t be able to afford schooling, and since the facility was free, it is nice to know they can learn basic things there. I am not sure if the organizers of the site were planning to have some sort of school, but even if they don’t, that can be another service project. I have always liked to paint, so to find out that I could do that and help people at the same time really made me happy. Now I am able to enjoy myself and know that some children will enjoy it as well. This goes back to the fact that there are always ways to help people, because even if you don’t actually think you are making a difference, in reality, you are making some kid somewhere smile. Over the summer, I think I might even continue painting the numbers, because the more I work, the faster they will be done. And when all of the numbers are done and moved over to the site, I really want to see how they change the way the place look.
Essay:
When I first heard about Service Learning, I thought it would just be an easy class that would look good on my college transcript. Now that it has been a whole year, I can see that it is much more than that. Service is not just to make you feel like you helped someone, it is to feel that they have also helped you in return. When you work on a project, you are glad that the people you are helping are benefiting greatly from you, but you also learn new life skills. Service Learning has actually taught me a number of lessons. The first lesson service has taught me is how fortunate I am. Now that I have seen some very needy people, I am much more conscious of how nice of a life I live. I need to be more grateful for what I have, and keep doing service to improve others’ lives. The second lesson is that I need to be more caring to others. Not that I am mean to people, I just need to be more compassionate and understand how hard of a time some people are having and try to make them feel better. I need to make sure everyone can have happiness in their lives. The last lesson I learned was that there are always people who need help. Even though this year of Service Learning is ending, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still needy people out there. I need to continue on with doing service, no matter how big or small of a difference I make, it will be helping someone. Over the summer I will try to find ways to help out and continue doing service. Doing service actually has made a difference in myself, and made me look at the world in a different way. It also made me incorporate the lessons I learned into my life. One of the challenges of Service Learning, and this is what I feared from when I first signed up, was that doing service would interfere with my learning of school subjects and take time away from me doing homework. But in reality, service was taking time away from me sitting at home doing nothing, so this class helped me benefit the community and myself. My first thoughts when I learned about the project I was doing were not so great. I heard it was a facility for children recovering from cancer, and not that I thought the project was bad, I just wasn’t sure about the facility. My first thought of what the place would look like was a dull, depressing, and unhappy environment. When I went there for the first time, I saw how far off my idea was. The place was open, bright, and cheerful. There were murals painted on the walls and a garden being planted. Although the place was not yet ready for children to come, this was the perfect place for kids going through such a hard time to live in. I worked on my project with Salma and Jasmen, and the idea of the project was to help children, people between the ages of one and 18, recover from cancer. The place itself was not a hospital, it was just a place where the children could live while recovering. There were many houses built and being built, and each house contained two bathrooms, a few bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. They were only one floor apartments, and another family would live upstairs. The plan was to have hundreds of houses, so that meant that there could be tons of families living there. On our first visit, it was nice to see the work that was being done, and hearing about what was going to be done, because I could just imagine how much this would positively affect the children. Throughout all of our combined efforts, my group had made somewhat of a significant difference. All the things we have done to help our project are garden, assemble beds, paint a sign in English to put outside of the facility, scan application files for new employees, and paint colorful numbers to go outside of everyone’s door. We did many things, and since most of those tasks only had one or two people originally working on it, my group helped them speed up the process. The other members of my group had gone back to site a few weeks ago, and they told me that children are already starting to live there. That shows how much the place has improved, and we helped. The bigger picture of what my group and I are doing is helping children recover from cancer. The problem is that they all have cancer, so we want to make their lives better. Cancer is a very difficult thing to deal with, so if you are already unhappy, then are brought to recover in an unhappy place, it’s just unbearable. But what we are doing is making a place where the children can relax and feel happy and free from the disease. I also think that there should be a lot more people working on this project. If there were more people, it would be more productive. There is only one lady who does the scanning, two people who do the painting of the numbers, and maybe 20 to 30 people who work at the facility itself and work on the construction. All the furniture that the facility has is all from donations, along with all the construction costs. If all that is helping develop this site are donations, then they need more volunteers. Next year I think the all Service Learning classes should take a field trip there, so more people can become interested in working there. The place needs help, and awareness is the only way it can get it.
Disability Report - ADHD:
ADHD is an accronym for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This disorder is usually classified into three groups based on the symptoms of not paying attention (inattentiveness), hyperactivity, and impulsive behavior (impulsivity). Inattentiveness is the least distruptive type, and have attention issues. For people who have it, they have problems when focusing in class, doesn’t follow through on instructions, is easily distracted, often looses things, has problems organizing tasks, and has difficulty paying attention when being spoken to directly. For people who have the hyperactivity type, they have problems staying still. They move around in their seat, leaves their seat when they aren’t supposed to, runs around or climbs when they shouldn’t, has a hard time playing quietly, and they talk excessively. Lastly, people who have impulsivity, they have trouble waiting. They say the answer before the question was done being asked, they have a hard time waiting for their turn, and they interrupt other people either in conversations or games. ADHD is a problem within your brain, but can, and is mainly, be caused heredditarily. So that means that if your either of your parents have ADHD, you have an increased chance of getting it too. Therapy is a good way to treat someone with ADHD, but it is also not very easy. Medicines are also given. The medicines used are called Psychostimulants (or stimulants), and even though they are called stimulants, they calm down the person with ADHD. Some of the stimulants include Adderall, Focalin, Dexedrine, Vyvanse, Ritalin, Concerta, Metadate, and Daytrana. If you are a child with ADHD, you need have special needs. Some of those needs include a limited number of distractions in the child’s environment, to keep a schedule and if you want to make a change make sure you do it in advance, give the child a healthy diet, reward good behavior, give the child enough sleep, and give the child clear rules. Although these needs are meant for children, some of them also apply to some teens and adults, it all depends on how intense your type is.
Table of Contents:
Smart Goal:
Goal: To help create a child friendly and sustainable environment for patients to stay in during the recovery period after their frequent treatments.
Specific: Our goal is to help set up and finish constructing half of the cancer recovery house which is called Health and Hope Oasis. Another Goal is to meet the patients before the year ends.
Measurable: The goal will be achieved when we can see that the children have entered the facility and are comfortable and happy there.
Achievable: It won’t be extremely challenging, but it will take some work to prepare the facility.
Realistic: The goal is within my capability, resources and authority. The only obstacles and sacrifices that my group faces are the transportation to the places where we work, and I also will need to take up large portions of my weekends when I work.
Timely: Many of the things we are doing are in order of the development of the facility, so our work is spread out over a long period of time.
Action Plan:
Target Problem: Children with special needs and illnesses who need a place to recover
Target Group: Children with cancer
Project Title: Wadi El Natroun. Made by the organization called Friends of Children with Cancer
Goal: To help create a child friendly and sustainable environment for patients to stay in during the recovery period after their frequent treatments.
Smart Goal 1: Prepare facility with basic needs for patients to live in such as assembling beds, providing each room with trash cans and furniture that was donated, and putting numbers on each little apartment to distinguish one from the other.
Smart Goal 2: Register all employees by scanning their files and reading resumes for them to be able to work at the facility since they need trustworthy and experienced nurses and workers to take good care of the children.
Smart Goal 3: Planting flowers and painting murals to make the facility look presentable and child friendly in order for children to think of it as a happy and fun environment rather than a treatment and recovery center.
Obstacles:
Tasks to Overcome Obstacles:
Journal Entries:
Entry One:
My first time helping the center was fun. The site looked very welcoming, with murals and bright colors, and it looked like somewhere kids could feel at home, even if it wasn’t. It looked like the site would cheer them up while they were recovering from cancer. What we did was we assembled beds and did gardening. This took seven hours in total, partially because the site is very far away.
Assembling the beds was pretty easy, and it was nice seeing the difference we were making. We assembled around 40 beds by the end, and that could’ve taken a whole day for just one person to do, so it was nice to know that we helped make it easier for the workers.
After we finished assembling, we went outside to prepare the ground to plant flowers. The area we were supposed to clean was sand, and it was full of all sorts of things, such as bottles, pieces of plastic, and a lot of rocks. We raked the sand for a couple of hours, and we felt pretty accomplished. You could see that the sand was cleaner, and I could picture how nice a garden would look there.
On this first visit, there were not kids there yet because the facility was not ready, but it felt rewarding to know I helped speed up the process by working with my group there. I think that when the kids are able to get there, they will really enjoy it. I want to go back to the site again when it is finished to see how it all turned out.
Entry Two:
Another way my group helped the cancer recovery center was scanning files. The file we scanned were those of men and women who wanted to be employees at the facility. There were hundreds of files, so the one lady who worked in scanning clearly needed some assistance. When we scanned, we spent around five hours on it.
Each file was between 20 to 50 pages long, which included photos and application forms. To scan each file took somewhere around 20 to 30 minutes. While I scanned, I looked at some of the faces of the new employees, and they seemed like people children would be comfortable around. Scanning was pretty boring, and it got more so as we went on for more hours. But when we finished, I was really proud of what we had done. We had each completed about 10 to 15 files, and since there were three of us the first time, that is around 30-45 files. If it had just been that lady working on the files alone, there would’ve only been a maximum of 20 done. We really helped her out.
I feel like doing the scanning helped me learn something about service. I learned that just because you are not actually at the site, or with the children, you are doing something for them. We were sitting behind desks doing paperwork, and I didn’t really think we were being that helpful for our cause. But when I think about it more, we were being very helpful. In every job, no matter if it is being an director or a musician, there is always someone doing all the paperwork and goes unnoticed. And even though no one thinks about them, they are what is necessary to the development of whatever job you have. We were making sure that there were employees at the facility, because if we had not done that, then it would take longer to get all the people to work there. I’ve learned that everything counts.
Entry Three:
On our first visit to the facility, we were driving along the road and I noticed that there was a sign for the site coming up ahead. The sign was in Arabic. I asked the organized of the project why there was no English sign, and she said it was because no one had donated one. I knew this was an opportunity for service. A few weeks later, my group got together and got supplies to make a sign. We copied down the logo and made it colorful and easy to read. We made sure that the sign looked nice, because we wanted it to be a representation of how nice the site was going to be.
The reason I wanted to have an English sign was because when we were driving to the site, I realized I was the only Foreigner. This made me feel that the site was limited to local help, and I thought that if it wanted to get bigger, they needed more people to help, and some of them could be foreigners. If we want people at CAC to help, I wanted them to feel like anyone can help, even if you don’t speak Arabic like me.
What this was teaching me was that I don’t always have to take direction, that sometimes I can think of something on my own. I thought that this would be a good idea for a project that would help out the site, and the organizer thought so too. Now, I am more confident with my ideas, and will make sure I say them out loud so they can happen.
Service projects aren’t just something you are told to do. People can conduct their own projects and they can be just as helpful. This has inspired me to do more service projects in my free time, as in over the summer. I can even do something small, but it will still be benefiting someone.
Entry Four:
One of the other ways my group has helped the facility was to paint numbers that would be outside the doors to differentiate the houses and rooms from each other. What we did was we got shaped wooden blocks, and each block was a different number from one to nine, and we first painted them white. After that, we traced the cartoon number onto the block.
We later painted each number, and we painted them all different colors. The artist who was helping us said that we need to make sure you only have one of each color on the same number. I assumed he just wanted to make the site more colorful, but when I asked him, he said that he wanted the children to learn colors. I thought this was a great idea. And along with learning colors they also learn numbers. Most of the families probably wouldn’t be able to afford schooling, and since the facility was free, it is nice to know they can learn basic things there. I am not sure if the organizers of the site were planning to have some sort of school, but even if they don’t, that can be another service project.
I have always liked to paint, so to find out that I could do that and help people at the same time really made me happy. Now I am able to enjoy myself and know that some children will enjoy it as well. This goes back to the fact that there are always ways to help people, because even if you don’t actually think you are making a difference, in reality, you are making some kid somewhere smile. Over the summer, I think I might even continue painting the numbers, because the more I work, the faster they will be done. And when all of the numbers are done and moved over to the site, I really want to see how they change the way the place look.
Essay:
When I first heard about Service Learning, I thought it would just be an easy class that would look good on my college transcript. Now that it has been a whole year, I can see that it is much more than that. Service is not just to make you feel like you helped someone, it is to feel that they have also helped you in return. When you work on a project, you are glad that the people you are helping are benefiting greatly from you, but you also learn new life skills. Service Learning has actually taught me a number of lessons.
The first lesson service has taught me is how fortunate I am. Now that I have seen some very needy people, I am much more conscious of how nice of a life I live. I need to be more grateful for what I have, and keep doing service to improve others’ lives.
The second lesson is that I need to be more caring to others. Not that I am mean to people, I just need to be more compassionate and understand how hard of a time some people are having and try to make them feel better. I need to make sure everyone can have happiness in their lives.
The last lesson I learned was that there are always people who need help. Even though this year of Service Learning is ending, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still needy people out there. I need to continue on with doing service, no matter how big or small of a difference I make, it will be helping someone. Over the summer I will try to find ways to help out and continue doing service.
Doing service actually has made a difference in myself, and made me look at the world in a different way. It also made me incorporate the lessons I learned into my life. One of the challenges of Service Learning, and this is what I feared from when I first signed up, was that doing service would interfere with my learning of school subjects and take time away from me doing homework. But in reality, service was taking time away from me sitting at home doing nothing, so this class helped me benefit the community and myself.
My first thoughts when I learned about the project I was doing were not so great. I heard it was a facility for children recovering from cancer, and not that I thought the project was bad, I just wasn’t sure about the facility. My first thought of what the place would look like was a dull, depressing, and unhappy environment. When I went there for the first time, I saw how far off my idea was. The place was open, bright, and cheerful. There were murals painted on the walls and a garden being planted. Although the place was not yet ready for children to come, this was the perfect place for kids going through such a hard time to live in.
I worked on my project with Salma and Jasmen, and the idea of the project was to help children, people between the ages of one and 18, recover from cancer. The place itself was not a hospital, it was just a place where the children could live while recovering. There were many houses built and being built, and each house contained two bathrooms, a few bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. They were only one floor apartments, and another family would live upstairs. The plan was to have hundreds of houses, so that meant that there could be tons of families living there.
On our first visit, it was nice to see the work that was being done, and hearing about what was going to be done, because I could just imagine how much this would positively affect the children. Throughout all of our combined efforts, my group had made somewhat of a significant difference. All the things we have done to help our project are garden, assemble beds, paint a sign in English to put outside of the facility, scan application files for new employees, and paint colorful numbers to go outside of everyone’s door. We did many things, and since most of those tasks only had one or two people originally working on it, my group helped them speed up the process. The other members of my group had gone back to site a few weeks ago, and they told me that children are already starting to live there. That shows how much the place has improved, and we helped.
The bigger picture of what my group and I are doing is helping children recover from cancer. The problem is that they all have cancer, so we want to make their lives better. Cancer is a very difficult thing to deal with, so if you are already unhappy, then are brought to recover in an unhappy place, it’s just unbearable. But what we are doing is making a place where the children can relax and feel happy and free from the disease.
I also think that there should be a lot more people working on this project. If there were more people, it would be more productive. There is only one lady who does the scanning, two people who do the painting of the numbers, and maybe 20 to 30 people who work at the facility itself and work on the construction. All the furniture that the facility has is all from donations, along with all the construction costs. If all that is helping develop this site are donations, then they need more volunteers. Next year I think the all Service Learning classes should take a field trip there, so more people can become interested in working there. The place needs help, and awareness is the only way it can get it.
Disability Report - ADHD:
ADHD is an accronym for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This disorder is usually classified into three groups based on the symptoms of not paying attention (inattentiveness), hyperactivity, and impulsive behavior (impulsivity).
Inattentiveness is the least distruptive type, and have attention issues. For people who have it, they have problems when focusing in class, doesn’t follow through on instructions, is easily distracted, often looses things, has problems organizing tasks, and has difficulty paying attention when being spoken to directly.
For people who have the hyperactivity type, they have problems staying still. They move around in their seat, leaves their seat when they aren’t supposed to, runs around or climbs when they shouldn’t, has a hard time playing quietly, and they talk excessively.
Lastly, people who have impulsivity, they have trouble waiting. They say the answer before the question was done being asked, they have a hard time waiting for their turn, and they interrupt other people either in conversations or games.
ADHD is a problem within your brain, but can, and is mainly, be caused heredditarily. So that means that if your either of your parents have ADHD, you have an increased chance of getting it too.
Therapy is a good way to treat someone with ADHD, but it is also not very easy. Medicines are also given. The medicines used are called Psychostimulants (or stimulants), and even though they are called stimulants, they calm down the person with ADHD. Some of the stimulants include Adderall, Focalin, Dexedrine, Vyvanse, Ritalin, Concerta, Metadate, and Daytrana.
If you are a child with ADHD, you need have special needs. Some of those needs include a limited number of distractions in the child’s environment, to keep a schedule and if you want to make a change make sure you do it in advance, give the child a healthy diet, reward good behavior, give the child enough sleep, and give the child clear rules. Although these needs are meant for children, some of them also apply to some teens and adults, it all depends on how intense your type is.