Redefine Your Possibilities... What do YOU want to do?

A few years back, the grade 7 & 8 students at Eastdale went on an inspirational trip to Hamilton Place. We were excited to be a part of the start of Me to We in our school board. The students were excited to be part of the day and were able to hear Spencer West speak. Some of our students were even able to record an interview with Mr. West . (I'm still trying to figure out how to add the audio from the interview to the blog:)

The man who redefines what's possible

April 30, 2012 | By Craig & Marc Kielburger

For one relatively unknown man, Canadian rock band Hedley interrupted their vacation after a gruelling tour to give a special performance in Vancouver. The Barenaked Ladies flew in from New York to join them, stopping work scoring a new Broadway show. Rick Hansen broke off celebrations of the 25th anniversary of his Man in Motion journey to roll in for the event.
All these big names punted what they were doing to show their personal support for an incredible individual:  Spencer West, who this June will climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to raise funds to bring clean water to communities in Kenya.
Climbing Kilimanjaro isn't particularly unique. It's an accomplishment, absolutely, but thousands of people do it every year. However, they have all had something West does not: legs.
Spencer is two-foot-seven in height, having no lower body below the pelvis. What he lacks in limbs, he more than makes up for in tenacity.
The first time we met West he was the tiniest man we had ever seen, roaring up in a wheelchair. It screeched to a halt and he launched like a ball from a cannon, executing a handspring and landing in this astounding pose with his whole body balanced onone hand, while the other thrust upwards to shake our hands.
Today Toronto is home, but when West was born in 1981 in Rock Springs, Wyoming, the first thing the doctor said as he handed West's father his newborn son was, "It's a boy."
The second thing he said was, "But we have a problem."
The family was sent to the medical facility in Salt Lake City, Utah, where tests revealed that baby West had a severe form of sacral agenesis, a rare deformity of the spine.
The entire base of West's backbone was missing and the prognosis was poor. One doctor warned that West would likely not survive past his teenage years. Another said the boy would have to spend his life sedentary.
West's parents decided then they would redefine what was possible.
By the age of two, West had taught himself to walk on his hands. In his autobiography Standing Tall, West claims he could get to the kitchen, grab a snack and be back in front of the TV watching Scooby Doo before his fully-abled friend had poured himself a glass of milk.
By six, West had twice undergone surgery, having his legs amputated to right below his pelvis.
Being short two limbs didn't hold West back from anything, even athletics.
West's high school was big on sports. As West jokes, at two-foot-seven he wasn't exactly qualified for the basketball team, and as for football, it's hard to play when you're scarcely bigger than the ball. So West became a cheerleader.
In no timeWest was famous for his cartwheels. In 1998, he helped his team bring home their first State Cheerleading Championship. After their win, West told a TV interviewer, "If I want to do something, I do it. I will always find a way to do it!"
West has risen so powerfully, with such boundless energy, that everyone he meets gets uplifted as well.
In 2002, West was working in a clothing store in Salt Lake City. One cold January day local TV anchor Reed Cowan came in to the store in a black mood. Within minutes, West's irresistible charm and enthusiasm had dragged Cowan out of his funk.
The pair became friends and in 2008 Cowan invited West to join him on a trip to build a school in Kenya. The Kenyan children were fascinated by him. Then one little girl spoke up: "You know, I didn't know that things like this happened to white people."
West had taught the children that people everywhere face challenges, and can overcome them.
"The borders and limitations that we've grown up with as people have been learned," commented Jacob Hoggard, Hedley's lead singer. "By breaking that mould, Spencer is essentially empowering all of us to see that potential within ourselves."
This June, West will undertake his tallest challenge yet: climbing Africa's highest mountain.
Talking about the climb, Rick Hansen said, "What Spencer is doing with his journey is helping us all to look at the obstacles we may face and realize that it is often a state of mind and that we can redefine our own possibilities."
That's why we joined Hedley, the Barenaked Ladies, Rick Hansen, and a whole restaurant full of people in Vancouver: to support this amazing man on his incredible journey. In coming weeks, we will write more about our amazing friend as he continues to redefine what's possible.

Ottawa!!

What a trip!
 
Each year I do these trips with students, I think, 'It can't get any better than this.' Well yet again, you've risen to the challenge and exceeded my expectations. It was an action packed trip from start to finish! 
We saw our history lessons come to life in the War Museum, heard a spooky love ballad on our haunted walk tour, made it to our 6:45am breakfast on time and had a nice chat with our MPP at the rotunda in the Centre Block of Parliament (remember to think about 'friending him' on Facebook). We all made it back in one piece from our 5km bike tour just in time for our trip to the art gallery and Mother Tuckers fueled us back up before heading out to the Museum of Civilization where we were all able to act like little kids again! 
The shopping was great and you were by far my most silent group during the lights out portion of the trip through the LaFleche caves (no farting, I couldn't believe it! Guess you saved it for the ride home:).
It was a pleasure hanging out with you all for three very full days!

Tell me about your favourite memory from this years trip.

If you have some great pictures for me to add to my collection, please email them to my gmail account.

Forgotten horrors - Craig and Mark Kielburger

"At least they killed you in Rwanda," the woman said to us, her voiced laced with bitterness. As she spoke she held up her arms. Where her hands should have been were instead two mutilated stumps.
It was 2003, and we were in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. The woman was one of many survivors we have met from that country's bloody civil war that raged for 11 years until 2002.
Chopping off the hands and feet of civilians was one of the signatures of Sierra Leone's rebel army, the Revolutionary United Front – armed, financed and directed by the brutal President of Liberia, Charles Taylor.
The 64-year-old Taylor is a Libyan-trained guerrilla, who in 1989 launched a civil war to become one of the most powerful warlords in his home country of Liberia. Then, from 1991 on, he used his soldiers and resources to spread civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
In 2003, after Sierra Leone's war ended, the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone indicted Taylor – by then President of Liberia -- for war crimes. Taylor resigned his Presidency and fled into exile in Nigeria until he was handed over in 2006 to Liberian and UN authorities. When Taylor was flown to The Hague to stand trial for the crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone, he became only the second head of state to be tried for war crimes since World War Two.
This week, the Special Court for Sierra Leone will announce its verdict on Taylor.
But most of the world's eyes have been focused on another pocket of Africa and another brutal dictator, Joseph Kony, a warlord in Uganda. We've heard how he recruited child soldiers, and made them commit barbarities. Everything Kony did, Taylor's puppet army mirrored in Sierra Leone. But the Kony story is still getting headlines while past atrocities in Sierra Leone might get a paragraph in the back of the news section.
In the Sierra Leone city of Makeni, one of Taylor's former soldiers described to us the indoctrination ceremony he and other boys were forced through when they were forcibly recruited.
Taylor's men dragged out a corpse, hacked it into four pieces then made the boys walk through the gore. Then they were forced to eat parts of the body. Taylor's men told the new recruits it was ancient tribal magic that would make them invulnerable to bullets.
An estimated 10,000 children, mostly boys, were turned into fighters during Sierra Leone's civil war. Thousands more girls were taken and forced into sexual slavery.
The war's death toll stands at approximately 50,000. Many more survived, but with terrible scars.
In our seven visits to the region since the war ended we have seen few improvements for survivors.
Sierra Leone remains one of the least developed countries in the world. It shares with Afghanistan the dubious distinction of having the world's highest maternal and child mortality rates.
Thousands of child soldiers have spent the past decade trying to reintegrate into normal life without much success. At more than 45 per cent, Sierra Leone has the highest youth unemployment rate in West Africa.
Western nations bear a burden of responsibility for the plight of Sierra Leone. Our lust for the country's rich diamond resources fuelled the carnage. Taylor was the funnel for millions of dollars worth of "blood diamonds" from Sierra Leone to the world market, using the money to enrich himself and supply the rebel fighters. In a bloody vicious circle, much of the fighting in the civil war was focused on controlling the diamond fields, and the profits from diamonds provided the funding to keep the fighting going.
Sierra Leone is dependent on foreign aid from countries like the United States and Europe, but not Canada. Aside from some funding for the UN World Food Program, we have dumped Sierra Leone from our aid and development budget.
However even that aid is paltry compared to what other under-developed countries are receiving. According to the World Bank, in 2010 Sierra Leone received $81 per person in foreign aid, while neighbouring Liberia received $356 per person – more than four times the assistance.
It's as if the world declared "mission accomplished" with the arrest of Taylor and moved on, leaving Sierra Leone to try and heal its own wounds.
Try to remember the last time you saw a news story about Sierra Leone. Supermodel Naomi Campbell got more news coverage in 2010 when it was revealed she had accepted blood diamonds from Taylor than the people of Sierra Leone have received in years for the suffering they have endured because of those diamonds.
It is a mark of the disconnect of the West from Sierra Leone that the UN court trying Taylor has chosen to release its verdict this Thursday, April 26 – the day before Sierra Leone marks its Independence Day.  Perhaps the court felt there was some sort of poetic justice in choosing this date. However issuing the announcement at a time when emotions will already be running high in Sierra Leone will almost certainly provoke riots, bringing further suffering to people there.
We certainly hope Taylor lives out the rest of his life in prison for his crimes. However for Sierra Leone, true justice will not be served until development occurs.

Volume of Cylinders

http://www.onlinemathlearning.com/volume-of-a-cylinder.html has some neat videos to check out

http://www.onlinemathlearning.com/geometry-worksheets.html  try this online quiz. You'll need a calculator, pencil and paper.

Magazine Covers

You can use your glogster account, publisher or word to create your cover.

What do you think about this?

The right to clean water

April 2, 2012 | By Craig & Marc Kielburger

Standing before the massed representatives at the United Nations, Bolivian Ambassador Pablo Solon raised one hand and slowly snapped his fingers – once, twice, three times. Then he held up one finger. With that quiet gesture, he hammered home his point: every three and a half seconds, somewhere in the developing world, one child dies of a water-born disease.
“Water is life,” he said. “As my people say, ‘Now is the time’.”
On that day, July 28, 2010, the UN recognized water to be a universal human right. But 41 out of 163 countries abstained from the vote.
One of those countries was ours.
For over a decade, Canadian governments have opposed the recognition of water as a basic human right.
We struggle to understand why.
Without clean water to drink we will die in as little as two days.
Dirty water is every bit as deadly as no water at all. The World Health Organization estimates that 3.5 million people die every year of water-borne diseases. When Ambassador Solon spoke to the UN General Assembly, he explained that half the world’s hospital beds are occupied by people suffering from illness caused by unclean water.
Water is so vital that each day women around the world spend an estimated 200 million hours hauling it for their families.
Access to something so essential should be a human right. Unfortunately that opinion is not universal, as our government shows us through their continued actions.
What does recognizing clean water as a human right mean for countries?
Maude Barlow, Chair of the Council of Canadians, says in her essay Our Right to Water that when water is a human right it creates three obligations for a nation: the obligation to respect, the obligation to protect, and the obligation to fulfill.
The obligation to respect means the government can’t take action or make a policy that interferes with its citizens’ right to water. So, for example, no one can be denied water for drinking and sanitation because they cannot afford water fees or taxes.
The obligation to protect means that countries must ensure no one else interferes with the water rights of their citizens. For example they must not allow private companies or local governments to pollute water supplies or prevent citizens from accessing water.
The obligation to fulfill means that countries must take any additional steps necessary to meet their citizens’ need for water. That could mean, for example, improving or increasing public water systems.
Last month, Canada was one among many countries that sent representatives to Marseilles, France, for the World Water Forum, the largest international gathering on water issues.
The February forum was the first since the 2010 UN declaration on water. Officials from international organizations and many countries arrived in Marseilles pushing for the Forum to follow the UN and affirm clean water as a human right.
Amnesty International and the Council of Canadians were among the organizations in Marseilles, watching Canada in action. In their reports from the conference, they have singled out Canada as a leading force using backroom lobbying and pressure to water down the language of the Forum declaration.
According to Amnesty International, rather than declaring water a human right that must be respected by all nations, the statement offers vague language that allows countries to decide for themselves whether they have an obligation to extend the right to water to their citizens. This would leave countries like Canada free to ignore the right to water when they find it inconvenient.
Why is Canada resistant to recognizing clean water as a human right? Perhaps because were we to do so, we would have to face the fact that our country, a world leader in fighting for human rights, is denying a human right to hundreds of thousands of our own people.
Right now in Canada, 112 First Nations communities are living under drinking water advisories that require them to boil their tap water, or avoid drinking the water completely, because of contamination.
Canada is failing its obligations to protect and fulfill the human right to water in aboriginal communities, and even some non-aboriginal rural communities.
We believe most Canadians see clean water as their intrinsic right. Witness the years of public outrage and backlash that followed the case of water contamination in Walkerton, Ontario, that led to seven deaths and thousands of cases of illness in 2000.
None of us would long tolerate having our access to clean water cut off. It’s time for us as a nation to recognize the right we take for granted is a universal human right that extends to all.

What do you think should happen about this?
Here is some background information to consider.

Background Info

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access to clean water and sanitation is a human right. One hundred and twenty-two countries voted

On July 28, 2010, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved a resolution declaring that

‘yes’ to the resolution. Forty

-one countries, including Canada, abstained – did not cast a vote.



clean water and sanitation to be a human right.

In September 2010, the UN Human Rights Commission also passed a resolution declaring access to



obligation to do everything necessary to make sure all their citizens have access to clean water and

sanitation, and that no companies or other groups interfere with that right by polluting water or taking too

much water so there is not enough for others.

The UN resolution means that all countries who are members of the United Nations now have an



governments have opposed making clean water a human right.

For more than ten years, in meetings of the United Nations and the World Water Forum, Canadian



contaminated water.

According to Health Canada, 112 aboriginal communities in Canada right now are facing problems with



Around the world, more than 884 million people do not have access to clean water.



The World Bank estimates that, by 2030, the world supply of clean water will fall short of meeting the

world’s demand by 40 per cent.



3.5 million people die every year from diseases caused by unclean water.



person in any other industrial country except the United States and Australia.

According to Environment Canada, the average Canadian uses approximately twice as much water as a



country uses in an entire day.If you take a five-minute shower, you use more water than someone living in a slum in a developing