Sisterhood of the Traveling Pandas: Jaclyn's Sri Lankan Experience

Our sister Jaclyn had the amazing chance to spend the summer in Sri Lanka and writes about the experience here:

"This summer I had the opportunity to do a volunteer service learning trip to Sri Lanka. One of my professors, Sriyani Tidball, founded a non-profit organization in the slum beaches of Dehiwela 32 years ago, called Community Concerns. I would like to do International Human Rights Law in the future, so Sriyani insisted I volunteer at Community Concerns during the summer. I jumped at the opportunity and here I am a year later in Sri Lanka. A Nebraska Chi Omega, Elise Polly, is volunteering with me in Sri Lanka as well.

Community Concerns has too many projects to keep track of so I'll share a little bit about two projects I have worked with. Salvage Jewelry is a company that makes jewelry out of recycled materials like kite surfing fabric, magazines, newspapers, and scrap leather. All of the jewelry is made by women that cannot afford to leave their homes because they have to take care of children. Salvage Jewelry allows them to make jewelry at home and get paid per bead or per piece they make. I help several days a week in their main office making tags, cards, and cutting paper for the women to make beads out of.

The next project I work with is the Baby Clinic, where I help every Wednesday. The Baby Clinic helps around 80 moms, 5 dads, and over 80 children each week. Most of these women have been abused, left by their husbands or widowed.

Each week the women are given a lesson and this past week was my turn to give the lesson. My lesson was on women and children's rights. Because of the culture here in Sri Lanka, their rights are different. I worked with Punesh, the woman who runs the Baby Clinic, in order to understand their culture and their rights, but still empower these women and give them a sense of what rights they do have. Most of them did not even know about many of the rights that I had presented. After the lessons each week, we hand out a snack for the child, like powdered milk and a bar of soup or vitamins.  Being able to educate these women has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in Sri Lanka.

 Along with these projects, there is also a child sponsorship program (I am now a sponsor of a boy who is going into University), an elders program, a drug rehab center for men, a safe house for abused and trafficked women, a Montessori school, a primary school, and an after school program. I have worked with every single one of these projects and can't even begin to describe how Community Concerns has changed so many lives.

On the weekends I get to travel and see more of Sri Lanka. My first stop was to the cultural triangle in the middle of Sri Lanka to learn about the history of the island. The next was to Arugam Bay which is one of the top surfing places in the world and yes, I did surf. I also traveled to Kandy and Nuwara Eliya which are two quant little towns. Then to climb Adam's Peak, which is the second tallest mountain in Sri Lanka! You climb 5,000 steps that are as tall as your knees, and the mountain is sacred to Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.

Jaclyn made it to the top of Adam's Peak, a sacred mountain for Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.

Throughout this experience I have learned a lot about myself and other cultures. It has been such an amazing experience and I hope I get to come back in years to come. I can't wait to home to my AOII girls, but will truly miss Sri Lanka and the amazing people I have met.

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Sisterhood of the Traveling Pandas: Katie's Ireland Adventure, continued

A few months ago, we shared a little bit about our sister Katie's Ireland adventure. Katie spent her summer interning at the West Sligo Family Resource Center in Enniscrone. This past week she helped at a children's camp as a part of the internship. Here's what she has to say:

This Monday through Wednesday, the organization I am interning for put on a children’s camp for the surrounding communities. The town I am working in, Enniscrone, is a small town surrounded by many other small towns so this camp attracted children from all over the county. We decided to plan activities focused on math and science because the government is really pushing organizations to figure out ways to get children involved in those subjects across the country. Ireland is at the very edge of the western part of Europe and thus attracts business from countries west of Europe. There has recently been a huge influx of technology and science-based companies finding homes in Ireland but there is a shortage of Irish employees for these new businesses to hire which is why the government wants to get kids interested in the subjects of math and science. It was also very important for the family resource centre I work at to get children interested in those subjects because there is a really high poverty rate in and around Enniscrone. It is a very rural and agriculturally-based area that doesn’t get a lot of attention. The idea is that if we can get these children interested in science and math then they can slowly work their way out of the cycle of poverty by gaining employment in the math and technology sectors where the pay is usually higher.

Each day we had an activity in the morning and an activity in the afternoon. On Monday we had “fun math” in the morning and built Lego Technic models in the afternoon. On Tuesday we painted signs for the Tidy Towns initiative in the morning. The kids each got to paint their own sign and got to put a friendly reminder on it about not littering and keeping the community clean. My favorites were “put it in the can, man” and the creative “throw rubbish away so birds don’t choke and die.” Well, it’s true! ;) The signs will go up around Dromore West which is the village where the camp was held. The kids were so excited that their signs would be up for the whole town to see. In the afternoon we did jewelry making which I was afraid the boys wouldn’t like, but all kids made at least one bracelet and one boy even made five! On Wednesday in the morning the kids did “outdoor skills” where we took them to the football pitch and they learned some football (soccer) skills. Then in the afternoon they decorated cupcakes which they all enjoyed so much they ate most of them instead of taking them home to show their parents.

I have been doing this internship for seven weeks now and this camp was definitely one of my favorite things I’ve done. It didn’t seem like much but even just getting them familiar with ways that math can be fun or teaching them how to build robots out of Legos is helping them- introducing them to things they never thought could be fun and making them enjoyable. Maybe not all of them enjoy math and science but hopefully we changed at least one kid’s mind about the subjects. All of the kids said they wanted to come back for another camp and the resource centre is already planning a Halloween camp and was just given a grant to fund doing just that. 

This internship has been such a blessing- it has taught me how to make a non-profit organization run from all aspects which is exactly what I plan on doing with my life. I am very grateful to have had this opportunity but I can’t wait to get back to my AOII sisters and family in Nebraska in just 15 days!

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Not Just Four Years. For Life.

Our sister Ashley recently wrote a paper about AOII for an English class. It's difficult to put into words how much AOII means to us, but this does a pretty good job!

"A big white door with stained glass windows attached to an old brick house. There’s a rectangle cover around the old doorbell button. The button pushes in easy with age and releases an exciting deep song of chimes, followed by the thumping of feet running down the old spiral staircase just inside. The door swings open with squeals of its age and tire to welcome you inside.

 Just inside the doorway is where old meets new. The lingering smell of old, such as opening an old trunk filled with memories and secrets from your grandmother’s youth that never fades away. The smell of new, from the fresh light blue paint across the walls and brightly buffed wood floors mixes with the old making me feel safe and excited. I walk forward into an opening just passed the entryway where I can see the spiral staircase and two big entryways into two smaller rooms. My hand skims across the plush red couch begging me to sink down into its warmth and escape into the calming blue walls.

The first time I felt my heart fall for the house was the day I moved in. Although I had visited it many times, the feeling wasn’t the same as that day I arrived with all my bags. The house had just been renovated; spruced up just in time for me to be welcomed into it. Not often is it a quiet home. Usually it is filled with chatter and laughter, to the point you can’t even hear your own thoughts. On the rare occasion you are there alone, sitting in silence, you will feel the house fill you up. Although no one is around, the ghosts of laughter and chatter from over seventy years fills the air and lives in the walls. It is a peaceful loneliness, as if you are never alone at all.

When I picture the first voice ever in this home, I imagine Stella George Perry, our founder. I can hear Stella whispering excitedly words of love and sisterhood to a small group of women. I sense authority in her voice, as she sets standards for generations of women to come, but a strong hopefulness in her heart. This was a time when women did not have a place on a University campus. On a campus of predominately men, the house provided the women a place to feel safe and secure.

These women forged a bond together to support each other’s growth and development when no one else would support them. They would help each other succeed intellectually, personally, and spiritually as they had little help from anyone else.  They promised in return to devote their time to the sisterhood and through their pooled resources and intelligence to make a difference on the campus. I can imagine a few years later a beautiful woman with dark wavy hair, dressed in a long formal coat, gloves, hat and heels walking up the steps toward the house for the first time. I see this happen through the eyes of my grandpa, standing across the street, as he has described this scene to me many times. This was the first time he ever saw my grandma, the first and last time he fell in love.

My memories of this house are a mixture of those I’ve heard from my grandma, and those I have experienced on my own. Bringing her to the house now, seventy years after she lived there, reminds me of a scene from the movie Titanic: the old woman goes back to the Titanic in the beginning of the movie and you relive the story of her youth as if it were yesterday. The girls in the house swarm around her as she describes her memories. She still refers to the entry way as the necking room as this is where girls used to kiss their dates goodbye -- boys were not allowed any further into the house. When she tells her stories all of the girls awe over her, as the times she describes seem much more romantic and intriguing. My grandma still imagines any formal date of mine picking me up at the door, and walking me over to the Student Union for a dance as she did in her day. She asks me if I get cold at night, sleeping in the house. I never understood why she was so concerned about this. Eventually I figured out she had to go to sleep with wet hair each night as they didn’t have hair driers when she lived in the house, and she forgot that we have them now. She imagines her life in the house seventy years ago to be the same as my life in it today.

Seventy years later I am living in the same building, with the same walls, same floors and staircase. The only thing that has changed is the people whom fill it. Right now it is I who fills the home. I take from it what I need-shelter, safety and security. I learn to love and cherish this home. Soon, however, I will leave so someone else can live there and take from it what I once did. I feel protective over my home and need to check on it from time to time to make sure it is being cared for properly, as it always cared for me, and those before me. It is strange to look at pictures from decades ago, of women sitting in the house, posed in front of the same structures I have sat at and taken my own pictures in front of countless times. It is challenging to imagine these strangers living in my home, and feeling the same feelings towards it as I do. It is even more challenging to imagine future generations of women living in my home, not knowing if they will respect it or appreciate it the way I have grown to.

This home is a historical landmark, so any physical features of the house cannot be changed. The people inside it will come and go. The colors will fade and change. The furniture that fills the rooms will be moved and replaced. The core of the house, however, its walls, floors and structures will never change. It is filled during the school year with joy and laughter then left to rest in the summer. I imagine the walls taking this time to soak up the laughter and chatter from the previous school year. Forever these memories are stored in the walls and cherished, just in time to settle and prepare for the new ones to come in the fall semester.  

The home holds the lessons learned by generations of women whom have lived there before us. It holds the tears of hundreds of broken hearts and the giggles and whispers of hundreds of hearts that found love. It is a home that holds people for a short period of their lives, but in some ways the most important times. It shelters our hearts and souls while we discover them and develop them. It provided a safe haven for our founders over one hundred years ago, when they had nothing else. It provided my grandma a home while at school, when her home was too far away. It provided me a legacy; bringing me close to my grandma, through an invisible bond, for one last time during the last few years of her life.  It then sends us on our way, strong, loving and courageous. It gives us so much but somehow still takes a small part of each woman, storing it in its foundation to support the growth of the next generation.

We join sororities for the privileges but are truly shaped from them by our obligations. The longer I have been a member of the community I realize my obligation to the other girls in the sorority, some present but mostly those in the past. Our home was built in a time when women vowed to support each other when they had no one else. Today it is just as important to have women supporting women in a way that produces active members in society whom are dedicated to charity. Hearing the respect and admiration my grandma has in her voice whenever she speaks of an Alpha Omicron Pi woman, I feel this obligation in my gut to act in a way to uphold her expectations. When I look back over pictures of my grandmother throughout her lifetime I clearly see a classy, elegantly tender and compassionate woman.

This fills my heart with respect and admiration, as I know she became that woman through her experiences and lessons learned in the house. Although nearly seven generations of years have passed, and times have changed so much, the quality of lessons and experiences have not changed. I look around me in my home, at the women that surround me, and I see the same classy, intelligent, compassionate features of my grandmother growing in the faces around me. I feel the same features growing in my soul. I hope that this experience will never change in the future generations. My heart says it won’t, but I will always be around to check on my home, and thank it for affection it has given me. "

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Sisterhood of the Traveling Pandas: Alia in South Africa

AOIIs love to travel and take on new adventures. This summer, one of our sisters was given the opportunity to study abroad in South Africa for a few weeks, but decided to travel early in order to explore Cape Town. Here's what Alia has to say about her experience so far:

"In January, I decided to apply for a summer travel abroad program to South Africa. The trip lasts 4 weeks and is centered around global health and the issues that South Africans face today regarding their health. The week before the program started, a few of the other study abroad students and I decided to check out Cape Town because our formal program was centered in Johannesburg and Kruger.

        So far, we have seen many aspects of Capetonian life. We visited the township of Langa and learned about their culture and way of life. It was great to experience how Capetonians live, not just the commercial aspect of the city. It was also very cool to see the different community projects that have been put in place and are making a real difference in the lives of those in Langa. For example, a community center has recently been built in the middle of the township which provides an after school program for adolescents, rather than leaving them to be influenced by drugs, gangs, or violence.

        Another day in South Africa, we rented a car for $20 (crazy, right?!) and drove through the little towns and stopped at the beaches and cliffs to take in the gorgeous backdrop on the way to the Cape of Good Hope. One thing we found ourselves saying was, "These pictures don't come close to doing it justice." About halfway to the Cape, we stopped to look at the penguins that were hanging out at Boulders Beach. After we got to the Cape, we hiked up to the light house at the Cape of Good Hope, where we could see the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. We ended the day by watching the sun set on Camps Bay, one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. Today, we ended our stay in Cape Town with a morning stroll through Bo-Kaap, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood with the brightest, most colorful houses. After that, we visited Robben Island, where many political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, were jailed during apartheid. The history that is interwoven into every detail of Cape Town is by far what has made my experiences here so rich.  

        Tomorrow, I head off to Johannesburg to begin my study abroad program and I can't help but to recognize how bittersweet it will be to leave this incredible city."

From South Africa to Sri Lanka, Spain to Ireland, and everything in between, our sisters are definitely creating some fantastic memories this summer!

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AOII Leadership Institue 2014

Seven Zeta sisters travelled to Franklin, TN at the end of June for Alpha Omicron Pi's Leadership Institute (LI) 2014. The 3-day conference of over 700 AOII sisters from over 120 chapters across the United States and Canada is a great way for members to meet, share experiences, and learn how to improve their chapters.

Zeta AOIIs at International Headquarters

We kicked off LI by taking a tour Alpha Omicron Pi's International Headquarters in Brentwood, TN! The building, which serves as an office for our executives, also functions as an AOII museum and is home to several sorority artifacts dating back to our founding in 1897! We even managed to find our chapter's submotto, hand written by Stella! How cool is that?

Our chapter submotto, written down by one of our Founders, Stella George Stern Perry!

While at LI, we heard several Keynote speakers including Dr. Lori Hart, Rick Barnes, and James T. Robilotta. All of the speakers offered advice on how to make the Greek experience the best it could be, by pursuing leadership roles and developing future leaders within our chapter. In addition to these speakers, we attended sessions on topics such as Diversity in Sisterhood, Governing Documents, Retain and Engage, and FUNdraising.

Saturday night was the awards dinner. Our chapter was lucky enough to win two national awards: Excellence in Finance and Excellence in Membership Retention. We are so proud of our members for helping us to achieve this, and so thankful for our advisers who guided us through this past year! Zeta chapter was also recognized as being a Ruby Level chapter, the highest level of achievement, for fulfilling at least 95 percent of our standards of excellence.

Zeta senior and Vice President of Administration, Charlie Bastian, says this about attending LI: "I was so excited when I learned that this LI was aimed at chapter Vice Presidents of Administration! As I sat in meetings with other VPAs from around the country, I heard so many new ideas that Zeta can implement. A few of these ideas include ways to motivate members to come to events that aren't required, how to better utilize our (already awesome) committees, and how to read and implement bylaws. Most importantly, I was able to share my love of AOII with my sisters. In the words of Dr. Lori Hart, one of our keynote speakers and an AOII alumna, "This is your AOII, this is your time. Go out and make it better."

As we set our sights on recruitment in just over a month and returning back to the Pi, we can't wait to tell our sisters about the awesome things we learned at Leadership Institute!

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