April 2019 - Blog CED

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<b><i><span class="fontstyle0">By Sina Gehrke</span> </i></b></div>
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Monthly Newsletter - Center for Education and Development

Download Monthly Newsletter here By Sina Gehrke

<span style="text-align: justify;">Earlier this day Thanh, one of the staff members at the
Center for Education and Development, asked me to write another blog entry
about my thoughts. Thus I sat down and really thought about what I could tell
you within this entry.</span><br />
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If someone would have asked me a while ago, maybe I wouldn’t
have had too much to say and maybe there also would have been a critical
undertone in my words. But from today’s view on things I see it a bit
differently. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It took me a while to see how much work the people here are
putting into this organization and how great it actually is that I can help
them with whatever they need help with. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I did not completely understand the range and influence CED
actually has and how grateful those people are who get scholarships or get to
work with this organization. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In the beginning the only thing that I saw was, how less I
could actually help and how frustrated I got over time. I came here thinking
that I would immediately get a bunch of tasks I could finish easily in a short
amount of time. I just did not want to see the truth; some tasks were quite
hard for me to do, especially because I just graduated from high school and
don’t have any knowledge whatsoever about the more advanced tasks here. So,
clearly, in the beginning there wasn’t much that I could help with except for
some text corrections and basic research. <o:p></o:p></div>
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With time I received more complex tasks that I had to deal
with over a longer time period and while reading through a lot of stuff and
reading more about projects that CED works on/ with I slowly understood how big
CED actually is and how much influence they have in Vietnam. <o:p></o:p></div>
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After hours and hours of doing research on things I have
never heard about I started not only gaining knowledge about all those things
but also about the organization itself and how my research was actually helpful
for them. I understood that it saves so much time for the staff members if I
did research and sent them my results instead of them reading through it for
hours. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Sure, there are still tasks that I cannot do, but I could
always try to work on them and if I fail the staff members would never pressure
me but instead they would give these more advanced tasks to older and more
experienced volunteers. In the beginning this bothered me a bit because
sometimes there was just nothing to do for me- in hindsight it is really nice
of them to give me the time I need to cope with tasks like that. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Just to give you an overview about some of my tasks, so that
you can understand what I actually do here, I would like to name some of my
latest tasks: I recently did a lot of research about the illegal timber
business in Vietnam and Cambodia and how the EU now wants to stop this together
with Vietnam by designing a contract where only certified timber can be sold to
other countries. I did not even know there was actually an illegal timber
market and how much it affects the forests in Cambodia, but I found it highly
interesting to read about this and to compile information so that CED could use
it for a proposal. I also did research about school safety and children’s
safety in Vietnam generally. I had to read a lot of bad stuff about how many
Vietnamese children still get abused, not only physically but also mentally. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I also read a lot about the Photo voice method, where people
get to express a concern they have about something throughout pictures and I
worked on a presentation that teachers could use in schools to implement this
method in their classrooms. Lastly, I had to do some research about the
programs One Drive and SharePoint so that we could have a presentation about it
for the CED staff members and, finally, can use it to safe all our files and to
share documents online in an easier way than before. Right now we are working
on setting these programs up. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I hope you could gain insight in the general tasks that I
work on daily. <o:p></o:p></div>
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What I meant to say within this article is, that it
sometimes takes time to see the progress that we make and that nothing just
happens because we want it to. You have to keep going and give it time. Then,
after a while, you will finally see that your work and patience paid off. <o:p></o:p></div>
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For the remaining 4 months that I get to work here I hope
that I will be able to handle more complex tasks and to observe the progress
that I made and still make in this project. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i><b>Sina Gehrke -  A </b></i><span style="text-align: justify;"><b><i>German volunteer</i></b></span></div>
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My thoughts about working at CED after 7 months - Sina Gehrke

Earlier this day Thanh, one of the staff members at the Center for Education and Development, asked me to write another blog entry about my ...