Life speeds up. We don’t realize time has gone by until we look at the calendar and… it’s June! Half of the year is gone and we ask ourselves: Have we accomplished our goals? Have we taken advantage of our days? Are we going to achieve our 2018 objectives? Each time I look back, I realize how much I run in my daily life. Between studying, sleeping and making chores sometimes I forget to stop and appreciate the small things we encounter in our way. Suddenly I notice that I’ve stop doing tasks th...

Honduras.Have you ever wondered why a 10-year-old boy is selling bread late at night when he should be in his bed sleeping so he can go to school the next day? If you haven´t done it yet, well…I have. I was leaving from visiting my family around 9:00 p.m when suddenly a kid comes after us saying "Do you want cinnamon roles? I have for sale!" I immediately turned around and was outraged by the image that was in front of me. I stood looking at it trying to process it. I told someone who was with...

Social networking sites have always been a way to connect with this huge and yet so tiny world. Platforms that were once particularly attractive for teenagers and celebrities have now become a part of life for one and all. From homemakers who once detested social media to businessmen who found it a waste of time, everyone in some way for some reason finds themselves being connected to a digital platform. When a passionate cook first uploaded the picture of her beautifully baked cake, all she wan...

The United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Volunteer Report (UNDP, UNV) (2015;13) estimates that there are 1 billion volunteers worldwide. International Federation of Red Cross, Global Volunteering Review Report (2015;3) points that as many as 17 million volunteers participate in 189 countries. If there is such a substantial number of volunteers worldwide, and we tripled it to 3 billion, we could have state and non-state institutions responding faster to service delivery than now;...

Fourteen year old me, who has never heard of the word feminism, decides to create a Tumblr account. Fourteen year old me encounters a poem called "Fears" and it sticks with her so much that she becomes obsessed with it, that now eighteen year old me still knows it by memory. "I´M 14 YEARS OLD AND IM WEARING A SKIRT THAT IS TOO SMALL FOR ME.WHEN I KISS MY PARENTS GOODBYE A FAMILY FRIEND LOOKS AT ME THEN AT MY PARENTS IN DISBELIEF.ARE YOU LETTING HER OUT LIKE THAT?I ALMOST SNAP AT HIM, BUT WHEN I...

Children, women, and men are mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, friends, and many others figures that are close to us and we cherish deeply. All of us have feelings and rights. Beyond politics, all of us have inherent human rights that must be interwoven in the way we live and act in our daily life. I reprehend and disapprove the constant and uprising belief that we are not the same, that our political situation defies and moreover, changes our rights on earth. The continuance of this belief has...

When seventeen-year-old Aime waved goodbye in 2011 to Kyaka II Refugee Settlement, a camp located in western Uganda, he thought it would very well be the last time he would lay eyes on the place he called home for three years. Indeed, after being forced out of his village in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a child, watching his siblings and parents being murdered in front of his own eyes, and then living in a makeshift shelter, Aime was more than ready to leave Kyaka II and start a new chapt...

Wilson Kubwayo was only two years old when he and his family were forced to flee civil war in their home country of Burundi. They made it to the neighboring country of Tanzania, where they spent the next ten years living in a refugee camp. During those ten long years, Wilson and his family were given an opportunity that he knew was rare. They were selected for resettlement in the United States. Wilson entered the American public school system as a high school freshman. Although he felt for...

At my high school, summer school speech is the way to go. Everyone takes the class for 3 weeks, 5 days per week, and 5 hours per day during their summer vacation. This fulfills their speech graduation requirement. According to the “grapevine” of communication between grade levels, fewer speeches are required and teachers are overall more lenient during the summer. This influences many student’s choices to take a summer school class versus a semester of speech.For me, I do not love to give speech...