Toastmasters and UNICEF

In couple of days we had two guest speakers, thanks to our enthusiastic teacher. First day it was a Toastmasters club`s representative Glen Tosaya, who in a very friendly way promoted the Astana club. Glen works as a corporative trainer, up to him local managers are not good communicators, because they do not know how to work with people. Frankly, it`s not only business executives` trouble, remember your last speech n front of the audience. In the official atmosphere I become embarrassed or get stuck with unexpected questions sometimes. May be I am to join the club ASAP, by the way it`s awfully tempt ting to try something unusual. However, Toastmasters is not only about rhetoric skills, as people learn to overcome their fears and control nerves, as a result one becomes confident and arise the self-esteem. Furthermore, club members evaluate the speeches, which means not to offence or minor but to learn from each other. I think that peer-evaluation can go together with self-evaluation in the classrooms. Just imagine that students at the end of the lesson make reflection on the classmates work. Well, it may be too long then. What if take toastmasters model into speaking class? Indeed I like the idea of peer-evaluation and I bet it will work.
The other meeting was with Hanna Singer, the UNICEF representative in Central Asia. Hanna spoke about the UNICEF activity as a whole and in Kazakhstan exactly. So many issues and problems were discussed but much more questions left. Our country takes first place in the children`s suicide rating, orphanages are full to capacity, disabled children are isolated from the society and so on… As an educator I am aware of the situation with children`s rights in our country, but that knowledge painful for my heart. The government, NGO and of course UNICEF do much to improve the situation, but it is very common in our country that every good beginning will fade or ruined by corruption. Remember the case with children infected with HIV in Chimkent several years ago, the fund was formed to gather money and donations to help families of those kids. A good idea! People could not stand aside and a big sum was gathered, but the money did not reach the point of destination. The head of the fund spent it on organizational needs such as a leather bag for 24,000 tg, office equipment and transportation, he also invested money into some business for a year. There is no law in our country about funds, so that man wasn`t afraid of it, but the moral law meant nothing for him also. You may argue saying that it was the only case, but people, it is a very example of our mentality, unfortunately.

visit that page: http://www.unicef.org/protection/index_57493.html