Looney Uni

This is a short time lapse of me going for a unicycle ride around Lunenburg, unfortunately the motion made the pictures blurry, but you can get the general idea.

We Scare Hunger

We Scare Hunger is an event held by Me to We groups every year to help collect food for local food banks.  Park View holds their event in Mahone Bay, and I've been fortunate enough to be able to help for the past two years.  All of the volunteers are split into groups and then given a route to take through Mahone Bay and knock on people's doors asking for donations for the Mahone Bay food bank.
This is a great event to get involved in because it gives you an excuse to get dressed up and go out on Halloween and actually accomplish something meaningful. Food banks are unfortunately a necessity, this year especially as demand for the food bank's services are the highest they have ever been in recent years. Most of the items provided by the food bank are privately donated, so it is quite an accomplishment to collect over 200 food items in one evening.
Seeing how grateful the volunteers who run the food banks are for receiving donations, and knowing that there are families who rely on the service to ensure they eat everyday is a fulfilling reward. Enough of a reward to make myself committed to remaining involved in any way that I can.

Cirque de Mertens

Most of the action component of my CAS hours will be working on what I call my "circus skills". These include juggling, unicycling, and stilt walking. I'm constantly practicing and trying to learn new tricks, occasionally involving two of these activities at the same time. The great thing about an activity like juggling is that there are always improvements that can be made and new things to learn. Once you can juggle three balls, you can start learning tricks, clubs, or add a fourth ball.

 

ACCIB

For these past months I have been working with a group of fellow IB students from Park View planning the annual Atlantic Coast Conference celebrating the IB (ACCIB).  This conference was an opportunity for students from across Atlantic Canada in grades 9, 10, 11, and 12 to meet with other students and discuss the IB program.
This will probably be the biggest time commitment of all my CAS activities. Our first meeting was before the end of grade 10, and our grand finale was this past weekend. All the planning and scurrying around ended with over 300 students arriving at Park View for two days of fun and excitement. And learning. Some of that too.
My role, together with Simon, was to sell the conference to students. We spoke in front of grade 10 and 11 classes at Park View, gave presentations to grade 9 students at Bayview, Hebbville, Bluenose Academy, and Chester, and spent a day in Halifax talking to grade 10 students at some of the HRM IB schools. Without a doubt this was the job that allowed us to have the most fun, but was also important because we were counting on drawing more HRM students this year.
The amount of work the group of organizers put into the event was definitely worth it, for us it was great to see those many months of planning come together. Hopefully the people attending found it just as worthwhile.