It is hard not to be engaged with the community as a Carihi student.
There are many clubs and organizations to be involved with at the school. To profile one of them, Carihi’s Global connection group, I sat down with former Carihi Mirror journalist Tara Warkentin to talk about the club and projects she is spearheading.
“I wanted to have a medium for creating positive change and getting to know what’s going on in the world a little bit more,” Warkentin said. “I had a conversation with my friend who said ‘I feel so sad and helpless when I hear about tankers or pipelines, or anything that’s going on,’ and I thought ‘hey, I feel helpless too.’ But I don’t feel sad because I don’t feel connected. So I wanted to feel more connected to things going on outside of our [insular] world.”
Currently, the club is working with Amnesty International as a base to write letters of appeal for relief of people in human rights-violation cases around the world. On Wednesday, Dec. 10, the group took part in “Write for Rights,” a worldwide letter writing event doing just what was mentioned above.
“[As a club] we’ve written a few letters of appeal. But basically with Write for Rights there are seven cases and Amnesty collects signatures and letters and words of appeal for those cases. So there’s going to be big sheets of paper for three of the cases. And every class in the school will read an article on each of the cases, then write a few sentences down for whichever case they feel most passionate about. At lunch, there will be a table set up where anyone can come write a few things if they didn’t get the chance to in class. Then the sheets are sent to whomever has authority over the cases.”
Other goals for the year include Skyping with a school in India, to talk to students their age and find out some of the similarities and differences in their education and lifestyle. Once connected with the school in India, Carihi global connections would find issues in the community or school they could help the students in India with. This includes a garden at the school, goats at a local orphanage, one long-term goal was even access to contraception. These goals would be met through various fundraising events and letter writing.
At Carihi, there is no excuse to be apathetic about community or global issues.