Right now, in theaters everywhere, senior tickets are at least 2 dollars cheaper. This is true in almost every ticket buying event. Senior citizens are well taken care of. Everyone tries to help them out as much as possible. However, it is not always easy to know what they need. Even in my family, my [...]
My 11-year old self set foot in Bangladesh with no expectations nor ideas of what the land would look like, what the air would smell like, what a taxi would look like, or even how the people commonly dressed. Learning about the country from stories of my mother’s childhood, movies, and television shows made me [...]
What do you want to be when you grow up? This question is asked to most children their first years of schooling. The most common answers are they want to be doctors, nurses, teachers, or astronauts. In the next decade, however, those big jobs they dreamt of having, change and sometimes it's not for good [...]
Ever since I was little, I have had a fascination with trees. I spent most of my childhood in Oregon, in a home dwarfed by the six Giant Sequoias growing in the backyard. In front of those sequoias, there were three English walnuts, a Katsura tree, and an assortment of Rhododendrons and Japanese Maples. I [...]
GEMS is a wonderful organization that helps empower girls and young women who have been exploited into sex trafficking. 20 years in the making this organization is changing these young girls and women lives by transforming them from Victims to Survivors and into Leaders, by providing educations and personal encouragement through leadership programs. Through their [...]
Due to my parents work schedules, my siblings and I spent a large part of our summers in daycare. As much as I appreciated and wanted to have a relationship with the adults that I was spending so much time with, a connection never felt possible. They spoke to me as though I couldn’t understand [...]
Children hopscotch in front of a crime scene and play tag by a memorial; our children deserve to reach their goals and have their name plastered on billboards rather than obituaries. Follow me home to Santa Rita and you will find the neighborhood with the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the county, the block central to [...]
When I first started playing violin, I began by learning the names and functions of each part of the delicate instrument. As a second-grader, the memorization was a daunting task; the only part of the instrument I could consistently recall was the bridge: a small, curved piece of wood whose function is to hold the [...]
Raising a child to be a citizen is an immense challenge. A citizen is someone who has a desire to understand the world, and a commitment to improving it. The global problems of today can seem so large that individuals feel their actions would be meaningless. This apathy cannot be an option forever. Without a [...]
Protecting Elders from abuse, neglect, exploitation, and maltreatment is a concern that must be addressed by all. As our elder population increases so do the concerns of how to treat them with respect and courtesy. I will introduce my clans in the Navajo Way. Yá’át’ééh (It is good; welcome; hello) shik’éí dóó shidine’é (my family [...]