| NEWSLETTER: Footscray & Braybrook campus (July 2006) | ||
|
The 'let us know' list 1. If any of your contact details have changed, please let us know. 2. If you are planning to have contact with your student outside of SAIL hours you must let us know first and complete the contact request form. 3. If you intend to bring a friend to SAIL please direct them to the website first and direct them to apply online or just let us know beforehand. 4. Let us know if you are going to miss a Saturday via the online "Can't Come Sheet" for Footscray or here for Braybrook 5. Please check and read your emails each week - if possible, Friday is best! 6. Please let us know before you speak publicly or publish an article about SAIL. Ongoing offers 1. Photocopying- for any SAIL related photocopying, simply mark the pages from the books you want copied and give the book to the co-ordinators on Saturday- it will be ready for you the following week! 2. The Tutor Resources section of the website is available at all times to provide tutors with ideas, games, work-sheets and support. We strongly suggest that if you are experiencing difficulties of any kind when working with your student, you post a request for advice on the SAIL Panel of Experts Bulletin Board. Diary dates 1. The week 5 tutor talks for 2006 occur on 26 August (SAIL's birthday), 30 September, 4 November, 9 December (concert) 2. If you are interested in attending any upcoming African Australian events click here for the details. Please read this newsletter in the following week, it gives updates on SAIL past, present and future! The next tutor and community talks will take place on Saturday, 22 July. For SAIL Junior volunteers, Sonya Solomon will be coming in to share fantastic arts and crafts ideas to use in the Junior room. This talk will commence at 1:00pm at the Braybrook Campus. For all other tutors, Maria Foster from Victoria Legal Aid will be coming to talk about legal issues affecting young people. For instance, how you can best prepare them for situations such as dealing with police, obeying road rules, becoming independent and more dramatic issues, such as domestic violence and abuse. Maria will also present the new booklet “What’s the Deal?” This resource has worksheets and activities and a copy will be offered to each tutor for use with their students, which we strongly encourage. Please pencil this talk in your diaries. This talk will begin at the usual time of 12:30pm at the Braybrook Campus. Finally, the community talk will be about police powers, emergency services and motor vehicle issues, presented by Springvale Monash Legal Service. Community Talks commence at 12:00 pm at the Maidstone Campus. Tutors, please inform Sudanese SAILors of this talk. We hope that you will be willing to sit in on this talk so that it can operate as a discussion point for future sessions. SAIL Footscray and Braybrook keep on growing! SAIL Footscray and Braybrook have not remained small for very long, with both campuses seeing an increase in new families and volunteers over the past month. If you see any new faces, please introduce yourself! Submissions to the SAIL Star We are on the search for submissions! With recent movements in the print-media markets, we’re predicting an attractive gap will soon open between the The Age and The Herald Sun, which can be filled by the SAIL Star. But only if we have submissions! In addition to SAIL Star specific worksheets that can be found in the folders in the library, general short stories, movie reviews, CD reviews, biographies, interviews and opinion pieces are always welcome. Submissions can be handed in to the SAIL Star box in the library, or to Cait and Cam. Lonely Shelves? We have a solution! Got some lonely shelves at home? The SAIL Library team is on the lookout for anyone who has any spare shelves hanging around at home or elsewhere in need of some books to hold. With only two shelves at the Braybrook library and many boxes of books still waiting to be unpacked, we are in desperate need of more! If you, or anyone you know has a shelf or three, please let us know. We are very willing and able to help with transporting the all-important shelves to the Braybrook library. Setting SAIL on Time A reminder to all volunteers to aim to arrive at SAIL by 10:20am, so as to be able to find their students and begin work by 10:30am. If you find that your student is consistently arriving late at SAIL, please let us know and we will investigate the situation. If you find you are arriving at SAIL late due to picking up SAILors, please follow these simple steps to avoid delays: Be Consistent: If you have the same pick-up every week, be sure to arrive at the same time every week.We suggest that all drivers aim to be at their pick-ups house at 10:10am (or earlier if needs be). Explain to those who you pick-up that you will be arriving at their house every Saturday at 10:00am to take them to SAIL. If you arrive at the family’s house every week at the same time, they will be expecting you and will therefore be more likely to be ready and waiting to head off to SAIL! Be firm: If you find that despite consistently arriving at 10:10am, your family is still not quite ready to go and you and the family are late to SAIL as a result, be firm. Let the family know that you will be arriving every Saturday at 10:00am and that they have to be ready to leave. It is sometimes the case that a volunteer arrives only to find SAILors in the process of waking up and getting out of bed! This might be the case on a first time pick-up, but if you consistently arrive at 10:10am, there is no excuse! Simply explain that you cannot wait for them to be ready, as you will be late to SAIL. Let the family know that if they are not ready by 10:00am, they will not have a lift to SAIL. You can be sure that, if you leave without them one Saturday because they are not ready, they will be waiting on the footpath for you the following Saturday, bright and early and ready to go! Call ahead: If you are able to, call the family the night before, or early Saturday morning to let them know you are picking them up at 10:00am. A call to remind them that they need to be ready on time in order to catch a lift to SAIL will be very helpful in getting things moving on Saturday mornings! Please come and chat with Cait or Cam about this option if you feel it would be helpful. Get help: If none of these ideas work, and you are still coming to SAIL late as a result of pick-up problems, get help. Come and chat with Cait or Cam about any problems you may be having with your pick-up, if you are consistently late to SAIL.We are always happy to help. About SAILAbout SAIL’s last cycle was filled with excursions focused on celebrity, opulence and hocus-pocus. SAILors went to see the glamorous TV show Temptation, the historic Como House and the magical Circus Oz. A special thanks to these groups for donating the tickets, our SAIL About team for securing them and the tutors who generously offered to take students along. If you watch Temptation in about two weeks you might be able to hear two of our students insistently whispering after each question: “Oh man, I knew that one”, and at one point: “Man, I swear that answer’s wrong!” SAIL Xtend Another action-packed cycle of SAIL Xtend has been underway with SAILors cooking up a storm in the kitchen, learning the ancient art of jewellery-making and training on the soccer pitch to prevent injustices at the 2010 World Cup. Thank you to all of our Xtend leaders for running the short-courses, especially in the face of insatiable student demand! The line-up for the next cycle of courses will include swimming, dance workshops, hockey and cooking. If you are interested in helping out with these courses and/or staying back to help drive students home please let us know. SAIL Braybrook Junior Room SAIL Braybrook now has a Junior Room! It is located in the house across the carpark, where the Senior SAILors and those students in Year 10 and above are. So if you happen to pick up any mini-SAILors on your way to SAIL each week, please find Cait or Jono who will take them to the Junior Room. SAILors Senior opportunity - Victorian Interpreter Card The interpreter symbol and Victorian Interpreter card is a great new initiative to help Victorians from non-English speaking backgrounds access government services such as doctors and Centrelink. The Victorian Interpreter card is a wallet-sized card that also aims to help agencies arrange language assistance in the correct language. AMES together with Centrelink and other agencies will be the key distribution point for the Victorian Interpreter Cards. The cards will be available to all AMES sites in Victoria, and posters and stickers are also coming. Should you have more queries in regards to the Victorian Interpreter Card initiative please visit www.voma.vic.gov.au House Wanted – Cleaning Services Available A former Footscray SAILor who now attends Dandenong SAIL is looking for house-cleaning jobs. Having completed cleaning units of a TAFE hospitality course and with a growing wealth of private cleaning experience, Rebecca is ready to take on more. For more information, please call her SAILor buddy, Judy on 9531-1619. ABC Radio – A broadcast on the refugee experience Recently, a genuine SAIL star was interviewed at length by Phillip Adams on ABC Radio. The interview was to discuss the growing number of Sudanese refugees in Australia and to track their journey by reference to the book, The Longest Journey, written in part at SAIL, by Peter Browne. To download the interview, please click here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/lnl_20060626.mp3 Driving Mentors Wanted: “L” Platers need Practice! If you or someone you know has a car, a full license & a spare couple of hours each week, we ask for your assistance to teach members of the SAIL community to become licensed drivers. Courtesy of two of the longest SAILing SAILors, Maureen and Rob, all the participants in the mini-program have already undertaken a day of basic driver training at the Metropolitan Traffic Education Centre, some have had additional private driving lessons, but very few have access to cars and/or fully licensed drivers to enable them to achieve the recommended 120 hours of practice before going for their probationary licenses. If you can help, please contact Maureen at roomoo2@ozemail.com.au Forced Migration Online: A Comprehensive Online Research Guide on Refugees FMO provides a wealth of information on people affected by “forced migration” – from general information on refugees to promote awareness to academic dissertations on the subject. Peter Verney’s guide specifically deals with Sudan, its history and its peoples displaced by internal strife. If you are wanting a superb background of the situation that currently engulfs Sudan please visit: http://www .forcedmigration.org/guides/fmo040/ COMMUNITY EVENTS Public information event on Darfur Darfur Human Rights and Development Organsation of Australia invite you to their inaugural event. This event will take the form of a seminar with three presenters discussing different aspects of the Darfur crisis. The speakers will be: Nicole Batch, National Project Leader of the Red Cross, Associate Professor David Dorward, Director of the African Research Institute at LaTrobe University and finally, a representative of the Sudanese community. It will take place in Lecture Theatre 3 (Pheonix Theatre) at Deakin University, Burwood Hwy, Burwood on August 2, at 6.30pm.Fundraiser for Amnesty Internaitonal Longtime SAILor, Marg asked that we extend an invitation to all SAILors for the following event: Jindabyne, a film about Aboriginal Australia will be screened on 23 July at 7pm to raise funds for the local chapter of AI. It will be showing at the Sun Theatre, Ballarat St, Yarraville. Cost; $12.50. < Total trivia The 1996 Australian Bureau of Statistics report on the Sudanese community in Australia includes a break down of languages spoken in the homes of Sudanese Australian families. Unsurprisingly, Arabic is most widely spoken. According to the same survey, the language spoken at home by 1.7% of Sudanese people in Australia is … Greek. (To show that we are not making this up, see the official report on the website of the Department of Immigration which is available at: http://www.immi.gov.au/statistics/stat_info/comm_summ/sudan.pdf After some careful arithmetic, we have deduced that approximately 1.7% of the Sudanese population who responded to the census in 1996 had absolutely no idea what they were filling in. Thank you for your contribution to the SAIL Program and to Australia’s fastest growing (and most oddly lingual) community! Matthew, Cait and Cam |
||
|
|