Description:

New Year party at American Corner Khujand with ELF Sharon Saternus was really cross-cultural event, because 5 nations were participated in this great event: Tajik, American, British, Uzbek and Chinese. It was unforgettable New Year in history of American Corner Khujand:
Program of the event included these steps:
Game “Take a sit”
Have a funny face: competition for the funniest face
Dancing with native American: introducing American style of dancing to others by Sharon Saternus
Dance Tajiki: introducing tajiki dance by our volunteers to guests
Read New Year wishes: in the beginning participants had to write their own New Year wishes to piece of paper and put it into the balloon, and at the end everybody read the wishes inside the balloons and were excited.
Having sparkles outside of AC

At the middle of the event our volunteers prepared a gift to our native American Sharon Saternus. Gift is presenting Tajik culture top Sharon.

Results: This cultural event one more time showed that we can build a mutual understanding between cultures and introduce our culture to other cultures, especial to Americans. And doing it through dancing was really unique way to exchange cultures.

At the end As Sharon Saternus said: “This New Year was really great!

Orphanage trip to Dehmay

American Corner Khujand in order to strengthen the community service activities sparked youth to be involved in orphanage trip. Main idea of going to the orphanage was:
Strengthening the community services in our town: in order to achieve this goal we have done:
Bring orphans donations that was gathered by AC: diapers, toys, socks and some warm clothes
Show to children a little performance “Santa and snow girl coming to orphanage” (fun stuff)
Give them New Year presents
Cookies and osh for all children

Results: - strengthening community service activities
- changing youth’s mind about community services
- involving more youth to this kind of activity
- improving volunteer skills of AC visitors
- encourage some able orphans to read poems

As Pamela (VSO volunteer who are volunteering their) said: “You have done really marvelous thing”
Special thanks to GCEP alumni Isfandiyor Boboev for providing this activity with osh and cookies for orphans and to the U.S. Embassy for supporting us in transportationJ

Announcing of the winners of the best poster for the World Aids Day

Where: American Corner Khujand
When: 3rd of December at 3:00 pm
Who: everybody

Speaker: ELF Sharon Saternus

Duration: one hour

Total number of attendance: 28 (19 boys and 9 girls)


In this one hour discussion Sharon announced the winner of the best poster for the World Aids Day. The posters were sent to our IRC for fair evaluation. Masuda Sobitova UGRAD who was in the winner team was represented this team. Winner team got as a gift the Info USA CD and Muslims in America. Sharon provided the laws and society survey, so everybody can answer questions in survey. It was about laws and students opinion about what laws should government have, for examples should government say where we should live, and everybody voting. It was interesting survey and interesting feedback of discussion.

Results:
· Winners of the poster were happy to be the first and ready for other competes
· Students shared ideas about laws and society
· Laws of Tajikistan and U.S.A was compared


Distributed or donated materials: Info USA CD (q-ty 1) and Muslims in America Journal (q-ty 7)