mariacas

This time Magda was busy and couldn't make it so I helped cleaning alone. However since the section me and Magda cleaned last time was the worst I was able to finish one and a half this time. Some cats have even moved in already. They are really cute, to bad it have been a bit cold weather lately. I worked for about 5 hours.

I've finally donated blood! I've actually wanted to to it for a long time but at least in Sweden you can not give blood until you're 18, and so when I just recently turned 18 I gave a couple of blood samples to see if my blood was good enough to donate. Not to long after I got a letter calling me to donate blood. So today was my first time. It took maybe 2 hours with preparations and all. I also got to know what blood type I have, turns outs it's 0 negative, which is great to donate since it can be received by all blood groups. However can I only receive 0 negative myself... Either way it was fun and it really feels like I've made a difference, someone might actually get a second chance to live partly because of my blood. Also, here in Sweden one receives 30kr when you donate but you can give it to a help organization while there. I decided to donate my 30kr to the Swedish union for blood disease because it made me think of a friend who has a blood disease.

The picture is of the note I got after giving blood together with the dietary supplements  everyone who donated blood get to help recover from the blood loss.

Since I really haven't done a lot of Service lately I thought it was time to really get to it. So now I've started helping out an old lady who runs a help organization for cats. During the winter winter half-year most of the cats are living with students here and there in Umeå. However during the summer many of them either go home or to travel, and so the cats return to her home. So during the summer the have an enclosure to keep all the cats at, and that is what I'm helping with. Me and Magda spent about 4 and a half hour cleaning the first section of the enclosure and still we didn't have time to clean the floor. Still, I feel really happy doing this since it feels meaningful. I'm actually doing a difference. The old lady was so grateful and almost chocked when I said I would be back to finish the floor and help some more.

Once again me and Antonia were asked to hang coats for a concert at the school. The policy is that is forbidden to have outerwear inside of the concert hall. That is why they need people to hang coats at the wardrobe before a concert. This time there was the NV3 class at out school that had organized a show they called "Rock and roller coaster". As a part of the school we did get to see the performance the day after and did therefore sit in the wardrobe and guard people valuables. The whole thing took about four hours. It was also really great afterward since all the performers ran to the wardrobe to help us hand out all the coats. They were also very grateful for us helping them since they were worried about it before we volunteered to help them out. They did a great job by the way, it was really fun.

It didn't feel like I was of much help this time. As we played Jeopardy to practice swedish with them I was the “host” and read the questions and the answers. Sadly I didn't do that great a job either. I have a tendency to speak quite fast and for a non-domestic speaker I'm really hard to understand at times. Well, I've learned my lesson and next time I will try to take that into regard and speak slower.

Ones again I ended up helping out with math. It went quite okay, I was even able to help a couple of my friends who got stuck on a few weirdly phrased questions. This time I was a bit annoyed that they didn't have the answers sheets to some of their math tasks either. It makes me feel a bit pressured since I really don't want to teach them the wrong things and I have no way to make sure it's right. At least this time we were two helping one student so we could discuss with each other and explain in different ways so that the girl we helped out hopefully felt that she had learned something.  ~50min

So every Tuesday our class will be helping out a bunch of IVIK students with whatever they need help with. This time I was to help a guy out with math (which happens to be one of my weak subjects), even thought I sometimes got confused it worked pretty well, and I like to think he at least got a little help. But I'm still kind of annoyed by some of the math questions. They sometimes made everything so confusing that not even I who is a native Swedish speaker could understand what they meant. It annoyed me because math is suppose to be a universal language. If you know English or Swedish well should according to me have very little effect on your math skills. We kept at it for about 40 minutes.

Finally able to have a flute lesson with Barbro! I was sad to hear that she felt as she had hit a wall and I tried to get her excited over the new tunes as well as helping her moving on. We played for about two hours since we had a lot to make up for the times we missed.

So after a week of having a lesson we are back on it! I can really see how Barbro have improved and now I really need to make sure I know what to teach her. Earlier it was just the basic that I knew very well, but now, since I haven't played for several years I've kinda forgotten a bit. She still have some problems of course, but hey! Rome wasn't built in a day. This time we practiced for about 1 and a half hour.

Hanging coats for a concert at the school with Rongedal and Backens male-voice choir! It was really fun and worthwhile. It took about three hours and afterwards we got autographs!

Yet another flute lesson. Now that Barbro have almost recovered from her cold she plays better then ever before. She plays really clean tunes about 70-80% of the time, compared to our first lesson when she played the tunes but hardly manage to play any of them clean. We played for about an hour and that is probably the time we will have each lesson.

Once again flute lesson. We kept at it for about one hours since Barbro's cold was a tad worse then last time. We are thinking about moving our lessons to Mondays instead, but nothing is decided yet. :)

Just came back from another flute lesson with Barbro. It is starting to sound really good and she have almost mastered H, A & G! Today we went trough C as well as note and rehearsing. We only had a lesson for 1 hour and 15 minutes since both of us was tired. I feel really happy teaching her to play the flute since she is very motivated and eager to learn.

So today I had my first flute lesson with Barbro. It went really well and took about 2hours. In the future we will have about one lesson a week, that probably will be about 1-2 hours each time.