【推荐1】My name is Jaimic Eckert and I’ve been into volunteer work since childhood. As a girl, I volunteered at animal shelters, played music at nursing homes, and helped with community cleanup after disasters. In college, I volunteered heavily at a large yearly conference for young adults, which is where I fell in love with my husband-to-be, who was on my team of co-volunteers. Since getting married in 2013, we’ve been living in Beirut, Lebanon. I actually have an online coaching business but I’ve had many opportunities to volunteer with projects for Syrian refugees (难民) and youth education.

I enjoy volunteering because most of the time, I do feel that I’m making a difference. Once I was leading out a project that provided food boxes to Syrian refugee families. When it was nearing Ramadan, the biggest holiday season in Islam, I literally stuffed the food package with extra treats...dates, nuts, olive oil and sweets. We took the package unannounced and ended up arriving just as the Syrian family was sitting down on their floor for breakfast. They had nothing more than a few pieces of bread and a pot of tea. The mother was in tears as she received us. I’ll never forget their gratitude.

Another time, back when I was in college in the US, a group of friends and I volunteered to drive to a distant church that was way out in the suburb and had only a few elderly members. The building was in disrepair and the churchyard needed attention. We stayed the weekend in the home of one of these old ladies so we could clean and repair the church. I’ll never forget how new life sparkled in her eyes. She couldn’t repair broken doors or pull weeds, but her love for us was unmatched. It breaks my heart to remember this old lady’s broad smile for such small efforts that we made. Sometimes, volunteer work is fulfilling not because of the actual job you get done, but because of how your presence impacts the people around you.

Volunteering makes me a better person because it gets me outside of myself. It puts my focus on others. It makes me grateful for what I have.

【推荐2】Want to explore new cultures, meet new people and do something worthwhile at the same time? You can do all the three with Global Development Association(GDA). Whatever stage of life you’re at, wherever you go and whatever project you do in GDA, you’ll create positive changes in a poor and remote community(社区).

We work with volunteers of all ages and backgrounds. Most of our volunteers are aged 17-24. Now we need volunteer managers aged 25-75. They are extremely important in the safe and effective running of our programmes. We have such roles as project managers, mountain leaders, and communication officers.

Depending on which role you choose, you could help to increase a community’s access to safe drinking water, or help to protect valuable local cultures. You might also design an adventure challenge to train young volunteers.

Not only will you help our young volunteers to develop personally, you’ll also learn new skills and increase your cultural awareness. You may have chances to meet new people who’ll become your lifelong friends.

This summer we have both 4-week and 7-week programmes:

GDA ensures that volunteers work with community members and local project partners where our help is needed. All our projects aim to promote the development of poor and remote communities.

There is no other chance like a GDA programme. Join us as a volunteer manager to develop your own skills while bringing benefits to the communities.

Find out more about joining a GDA programme:

Website:www.glodeve.org

Email:humanresources@glodeve.org

【推荐3】Volunteer Day

What better way is there to enjoy your own hobbies while helping others at the same time? Come to Volunteer Day and choose an activity you’d like to join for the day. See below for a schedule of events on Volunteer Day.

Volunteer Day Schedule:

7:30 a.m.: Meet at the Community Centre for juice and bagels.

8:00-8:30 a.m.: Choose which activity you’d like to help with for the day.

8:30 a.m.: Board the bus to your activity site.

9:00 a.m.-3:30 p.m.: Work as a volunteer.

3:30 p.m.: Board the bus that will take you back to the Community Centre.

See below for a list of volunteer opportunities for Volunteer Day so you can begin thinking about which activity you might want to join.

A list of volunteer activities:

Paint houses: Happy Homes is a local organization that provides home painting. For elderly or physically disabled people who cannot do repairs to their homes, Happy Homes provides volunteer painters to repaint old houses.

Plant flowers: Help plant flowers and bushes in city parks, help lay paths at Cave Springs Park, or help pick up rubbish around the river banks.

Read to children: Love and Learning is an organization that provides volunteers to help children with learning disabilities. Read books out loud to groups of children four to six years old, or read one-on-one with struggling readers seven to eight years old.

Play with animals: Lovely Friends is an organization that visits local animal shelters and provides volunteers to spend time with the animals while their cages are being cleaned.

If you take interest in it, please call 0195242 for more information.

【推荐3】Flying High

Barrington Irving made his historic flight and founded an educational non-profit-making organization. The secret, he believes, is having a dream in the first place, and that starts with learning experiences that inspire kids to build careers.

The moment of inspiration for Irving came in his parents’ bookstore. One customer, a professional pilot, asked Irving if he’d thought about becoming a pilot. “I told him I wasn’t smart enough; but the next day he took me to the cockpit (驾驶舱) of the commercial airplane he flew, and just like that I was hooked.”

To follow his dream, Irving turned down a football scholarship to the University of Florida. He washed airplanes to earn money and increased his flying skills by practising at home on a $40 flight simulator (模拟) video game. Then another dream took hold: flying alone around the world. He faced more than 50 rejections for sponsorship before convincing some companies to donate aircraft components. He took off with no weather radar, no de-icing system, and just $30 in his pocket.

After 97 days, 26 stops and dozens of thunderstorms, he touched down to a cheering crowd in Miami. “It was seeing so many young people watching and listening that pushed me into giving back with my knowledge and experience.” Irving has been doing it ever since. He set up his non-profit-making organization, Experience Aviation (航空), aiming to increase the numbers of youth in aviation and science-related careers. “We want to create chances for students to accomplish something amazing,” he notes. The most powerful educational tool is the example his own life provides.

【推荐1】Yang Fei, a man in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, has painted anti-poverty stories of the Jinjiang village in the province’s Yongsheng county in the form of 30 different short cartoons.

After graduating from the Film and Television Animation Institute of the Communication University of Shaanxi in 2009, Yang began to work in the culture house of Yunnan’s Lijiang City. Yang was sent to the Jinjiang Village in 2017 in his first such job, where he stayed for a month working on explaining government poverty alleviation(扶贫) policies to the villagers, and he was again sent to the village in August this year to monitor the poverty work.

“After staying more than 20 days in the Jinjiang Village in August, I was quite impressed with different changes the village had undergone under different poverty alleviation efforts, and I came up with the idea of painting cartoons to tell others the marvelous stories,” Yang said.

After getting back to Baoshan Village of the province’s Yulong County where he works currently as a volunteer of poverty alleviation, he worked on the cartoons in the evenings after work. After working more than two weeks, his more than 30 pages of cartoon drew to an end. Drawing cartoons is a way Yang tries to keep and remember his experiences as a poverty alleviation official, and he was encouraged by his colleagues to produce more such work in the future.

Yang has accepted the request of his colleagues, and plans to paint some cartoons telling the stories of the poverty work team of the Baoshan Village.

【推荐2】Movie Extras

“Would you mind lying in a coffin? Would you shave your head? Are you willing to take out your false teeth?”

These are just a few of the questions Anne Marie Stewart and her staff sometimes ask the “talent” who serve as non-speaking “extras” in special films, television series, and made-for-TV movies produced in Toronto.

Of course, the majority of extra calls are for more ordinary people, and Stewart has a list of about 650 registered extras. Crowd scenes, which are common, call for everyday people of all ages, ethnic backgrounds, and sizes.

Over at Movie People, last-minute requests are not unusual. “We got a request once for an entire brass band of 30 people. They wanted it within the hour,” said manager Yvonne McCartney. Another time, the company got a last-minute request for a newborn baby. “We found a baby that was three weeks premature,” said Jonathan Aiken, an owner of the company.

Then there was the worried call from a casting director whose “Star” got doggone stubborn one day and decided to just lie down and not work. The director needed a replacement dog, fast. “We got them two in one hour.” said Aiken. “It was a matter of good connections and fast phone work.” The eight phone lines needed to make 350 to 400 calls a day are one of Movie People’s major expenses.

Phone lines are the only way to stay in touch with casting directors and extras; but the latter are a group not necessarily interested in a long-term relationship. Most extra jobs pay only $7 an hour (with a six-hour minimum), while most agencies charge an annual $75 registration fee and get 10 to 15 per cent of extras’ earnings. It’s no wonder that the turnover rate is fairly high.

Some people who are between jobs do extra work as a temporary measure, said McCartney. But professionals, such as lawyers, also do the work because it’s interesting. Others with flexible jobs have a desire to do something different. Some homemakers want to get out of the house and onto a movie set. Money’s not the motivating reason.

“One of the first things I say to people who walk in and ask about being an extra is, ‘You have to be available,’” said a person at Karen Clifton Agency. Inc. “The next thing I say is, ‘You can't make a living at this.’”

【推荐3】Barditch High School decided to have an All-School Reunion. Over 450 people came to the event. There were tours of the old school building and a picnic at Confederate Park. Several former teachers were on hands to tell stories about the old days. Ms. Mabel Yates, the English teacher for fifty years, was wheeled to the park.

Some eyes rolled and there were a few low groans (嘟囔声) when Ms.Yates was about to speak. Many started looking at their watches and coming up with excuses to be anywhere instead of preparing to listen to a lecture from an old woman who had few kind words for her students and made them work harder than all the other teachers combined.

Then Ms. Yates started to speak: “I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be here. I haven’t seen many of you since your graduation, but I have followed your careers and enjoyed your victories as well as crying for your tragedies. I have a large collection of newspaper photographs of my students. Although I haven’t appeared in person, I have attended your college graduations, weddings and even the birth of your children, in my imagination.”

Ms. Yates paused and started crying a bit. Then she continued: “It was my belief that if I pushed you as hard as I could, some of you would succeed to please me and others would succeed to annoy me. Regardless of our motives, I can see that you have all been successful in your chosen path.”

“There is no greater comfort for an educator than to see the end result of his or her years of work. You have all been a great source of pleasure and pride for me and I want you to know I love you all from the bottom of my heart.”

There was a silence over the crowd for a few seconds and then someone started clapping. The clapping turned into cheering, then into a deafening roar (呼喊). Lawyers, truck drivers, bankers and models were rubbing their eyes or crying openly with no shame all because of the words from a long forgotten English teacher from their hometown.

【推荐1】The other day I was shopping at a local store and came upon a lady from India squatting on the floor looking for a certain product on the bottom shelf. She sprang up when she saw me as if to get out of my way. Apologetically she explained that she was a cashier at a nearby store and was on her lunch break, trying to get a few needed items before her time was up.

I reassured her, "I am in no hurry. Go ahead and do what you need to do." While she searched for a particular brand, she said that sometimes customers were rude to her at the store and she really appreciated my kindness. I told her that I had noticed cashiers being treated rudely by some people.

I also explained to her that I was a retired nurse and understood some of what she was saying first hand. Sometimes patients, families, or doctors could be very rude or mean. But I tried to understand why they were feeling that way and let it go. "The world would be a better place if we all acted kindly toward each other. Those who are rude may have bad karma coming after them eventually." I added.

She nodded and was surprised, “So you know about karma?” My reply was simple. “A little bit. Karma is the same thing as doing something bad and it comes back to bite you on the butt.” She paused, looked puzzled, then broke out in a big smile and covered her mouth with her hand, laughing as she walked away.

It felt so good that in a brief exchange I showed her there were kind people in the world, which might have helped her regain her faith in humanity.

【推荐2】In the ongoing battle between Tiger Moms, French Mamas, and everyone else who wants to know what is the best way to raise their kids, a new study adds evidence that the extreme Tiger-style may do more harm than good. Authoritarian parents are more likely to end up with disrespectful children with violent behaviors, the study found, compared to parents who listen to their kids with the goal of gaining trust.

It was the first study to look at how parenting styles affect the way teens view their parents and, in turn, how they behave. The study considered three general styles of parenting. Authoritative parents are demanding and controlling while also being warm and sensitive to their children’s needs. Authoritarian parents, on the contrary, are demanding and controlling without the appearance of caring, attachment and receptiveness. They take a “my way or the highway” approach to their kids. Permissive parents, the third group, have warm and receptive qualities, but they set few boundaries and carry out few rules.

Using data on early 600 kids from an ongoing study of middle school and high school students in New Hampshire, researchers from the University of New Hampshire were able to find “my way or the highway” parenting with more violent behaviors like robbery, drug-taking, and attacking someone else with the intention of hurting or killing. Firm but loving parenting, on the other hand, led to fewer lawbreakers. Permissive parenting, surprisingly, didn’t seem to make much of a difference either.

To explain the rink between parenting style and behavior in kids, the researchers suggested that what matters most is how reasonable kids think their parents’ power is. This sense comes when kids trust that their parents are making the best decisions for them and believe that they need to do what their parents say even if they don’t always like how their parents are treating them. When kids respect the power of their parents, the researchers reported in the journal ofAdolescence, their behavior is better. Previous research has also linked firm but caring parenting with kids who have more self-control and independence.

“When children consider their parents to be the reliable figure, they trust the parents and feel that they have a duty to do what their parents tell them to do,” said lead researcher Pick Trinkner. “This is very important as the parent doesn’t have to rely on a system of rewards and punishments to control behavior and the child is more likely to follow the rules when the parent is not physically present.”

【推荐3】Wildlife has been greatly threatened in the modern age. There are species that are disappearing every day. The white-naped crane is a typical example. So scientists are trying their best to save the species from going out of existence.

Chris and Tim work at a zoo, helping endangered cranes with — their reproduction. Emma, a female crane, has been in their care since she arrived in 2004.

Born at an international crane foundation, Emma was raised by human caretakers. This led to an unexpected consequence, though she had a wonderful time there. Emma had never taken herself as a crane and become attached to humans. She refused to live with male cranes, and even had a reputation for killing some of them, which made it impossible for her to become a mother.

However, the two zookeepers didn't want to see the extinction of this precious species. With their patience and efforts, they successfully developed a combination of artificial breeding and natural reproduction. This enabled Emma to give birth to five baby cranes.

The two keepers are proud of their productive work. But before they can be assured, more efforts must be made, because the population of the crane in the wild is on the decline, and many other species appear headed toward extinction. After all, not everyone has realized that wildlife has thoughts, feelings, and most importantly, equal rights to survive.

How can we bridge the ever-widening gap that separates us from other animals? Chris and Tim offered us the answer: human beings took it for granted that their brains held all the solutions, but maybe their hearts can be a better guide.