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I am thrilled to share this very special guest post from eleven year old Mallory; sixth grader and world-change agent.

You will be amazed and inspired as you hear her describe the day she made the decion to change the world.

In October 2011 I sat down to write my Christmas list for my parents, I looked around my room and I realized there was nothing I needed, nothing I wanted. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought about the children in Africa, and how they weren’t going to get Christmas presents, and there was a lot of things that they needed. So, I sent my mom an email with my Christmas list, one thing on it, to help Africa.

See, in August of 2010 the Ugandan Orphan Children’s Choir came to my church to perform, and I got to meet the children, and they were amazing. They were so loving, and just wanted to hug me and hold my hand. My mom had also started doing work for a couple of organizations that helped in Uganda, so she had taught me about the children there.

The day after I sent the email my Mom and I sat down and talked about what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to help. I contacted Amazima Ministries and Project Have Hope and I told them what I wanted to do, and I asked them how I could best help them. That is how Project Yesu was born.

My goals at first were simple, I wanted to raise $600 to sponsor 2 children, one from Amazima and one from Project Have Hope. When you sponsor a child, it pays for food, medicine and sends them to school. I also decided I wanted to send Christmas cards to the children in Uganda, I mean who doesn’t like to get a card, it makes you smile. So I drew two different card designs and I contacted a local printing company and asked them if they would donate the printing of 650 cards, they did.

So I started to tell people about Project Yesu, and my mom helped me start a blog so people could read about it. I met with my Children’s pastor and asked if our youth group could help me with the cards, because I wanted them to be personal, so I needed a lot of help to write out 650 cards. I also spoke to my youth group, and told them about Project Yesu and about the children in Uganda and asked them to help me raise money. Every week I set up a booth at my church to tell people about my project, and the word spread.  

In only 8 weeks I raised over $2,400 and I was able to sponsor 7 children. It was way more then I had originally planned on and it was great. I got to meet some wonderful people, and tell them my story. I was invited to go to WAYFM a Christian radio station because they learned about my project, and I was even on TV. The NBC station out of Nasvhille did a story on Project Yesu.

I read a quote one day from Mahatma Ghandi that said, “Be the change you want to see in the world”. That’s what I want to do, I want to be the change, I want to make a difference, I want to help people. Everyone thinks kids are selfish or that we’re just kids and we can’t do anything like this. I want to show people what a difference one person can make. If someone, because they heard about me, or met me, decides that they can be a change too, then it will spread from me, to that person, to another person and so on.

Kids have good ideas, and you know what? We don’t know all the reasons why it won’t work, we just know we what we want to do.  I know with Project Yesu, I am making a difference, not only in the lives of the seven children in Uganda who now have food, medicine and can go to school. But I am making a difference in the lives of my family, my friends, my teachers and even people I have never met before.

I want Project Yesu to continue to spread and grow, and to do that I need people like you, who are reading this post to spread the word and to help me. My goals for 2012 is to raise $4,500 who knows maybe I’ll double that this year or even triple that and be able to help more and more children in Uganda. I plan to travel to Uganda in December of 2012 to hand deliver the Christmas cards to the children, to meet my sponsored children and to love on the children of Uganda who have changed my life.

If you want to know more about Project Yesu, or how you can help you can find me on 

• Facebook  
• My site.

I am selling T-shirts and wristbands to raise funds, and I am also looking for families, groups, classrooms or anyone to be a part of the Be The Change campaign by collecting coins to donate towards Project Yesu.

So I have accepted the challenge to be the change….will you?

 

Source: etd.lsu.edu

There are some who would think that your internet privileges should be revoked should you never have run across lolcats photos of cats, often in humorous positions, captioned in what seems like a rudimentary form of English. One of the most famous lolcats, rather overweight specimen of a cat, bears the caption I can has cheezburger?, which helped spawn not only a plethora of other lolcat images, but also the website icanhascheezburger.com (which has just celebrated its five-year anniversary), where people can submit their own.

lolcats are a prime example of what is known as a meme: an image or concept that spreads rapidly from user to user over the internet (also known as a macro image). There are many of these, and to the unfamiliar their names seem very odd indeed, for example: socially awkward penguin, good guy Greg, nope! Chuck Testa, and internet husband. Confused? Luckily there is a site that seeks to help out those dazed and confused by the huge variety of memes that have gained popularity or notoriety knowyourmeme.com.

However, it seems that in the 5 years since the meme first became popular online and spawned thousands of copycats (sorry), there is more to lolspeak than meets the eye. So much so, in fact, that Jordan Lefler, a student at the University of Louisiana, has published a 129-page thesis entitled I can has thesis?: A linguistic analysis of lolspeak. In the thesis she explores lolspeak from its very roots as an image meme, to its evolving linguistic properties. While it may seem to be a randomly warped version of English, it turns out that lolspeak kind of like ebonics is an artificial dialect in its own right, and actually has its own syntax, formulas and punctuation rules, the proof being that there is enough structure there for somebody to write an entire thesis about it.

You can read the entire thesis for free on the lsu.edu site.

Do you decide to become an EKG technician? It is a growing and demanding field because of the risk of heart problems related to heredity or simply because of the obesity problem that affects all American people. Of course, fitness and nutrition routine helps reduce the risk of heart disease, but specialists with EKG technician training are always in demand. As you may have expected, EKG technicians are usually employed in hospitals and clinics, but there are certainly options to private practice, particularly for cardiologists.

If you are curious to know what it is like to be an ECG technician, this article will help you. ECG tests are created to help doctors diagnose blockages of blood vessels and heart problems. The technology exploits the complex equipment and monitors the patient throughout the procedure to ensure that they are not at risk at any time during the test. In some cases, the EKG technician will describe the test process to the patient if the physician has not already done so. Technicians should not provide the results for the patient, because the doctor will use them for examination. ECG is performed by placing the electrodes on chest, legs and arms. Sometimes it is necessary to shave off some hair from legs, arms and chest of a patient to ensure that skin contact is good. Then the electrical impulses of the heart will be traced as they travel through the body and recorded by the machine. The results are printed and delivered to the referring cardiologist.

Additional training in ECG allows a worker to perform Holter monitor and stress testing procedures. The Holter monitor is usually attached to a patient to record the electrical impulses over a period of 24 hours. It is required if the problem is erratic and not reproducible.

Death brings a book rec. Who wouldda thunk?

I blogged about a man’s passing yesterday and one thing I didn’t mention which I now feel I ought is that Fred was a reader. Big time. It’s not something lost on me that 1) I know my fair share of “successful” people and 2) to a person, I can’t think of one of them who is not a reader.

I wonder if the next generation, the one being raised with the web and such, will prove the corollary, however anecdotal, different?

Are all these folks I know who are successful successful because they read or did they become successful as a by-product of being a reader? I really do wonder.

During the eulogy, his son mentioned his father’s favorite book of all time? (No, not anything I have written but I do think that because I’m an author Fred held me in a little bit of a “we’re in the club” light as he’d written books in his field of medical specialty himself.)

His all time favorite title? A book I’ve never read, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT.

Sure, I’ve seen the Brad Pitt movie – and I really, really liked it – but as the son spoke about why his dad was so nuts for this book, I realized, “Man, I gotta read this novel.”

So death brings a book rec. Who wouldda thunk?

HALTOM CITY A Keller middle school teacher has turned himself over to police after being accused of having an improper relationship with a student.

Three days before Christmas, officials with the Keller Independent School District notified Haltom City police of the accusations. A 17-year old female student had told her parents that she had a sexual relationship with 34-year-old teacher Chad Eric Bearden and the adults contacted the school district.

The teenager claims she and Bearden had sex on two separate occasions at his apartment in Haltom City.

The girl was not a student of Beardens at the time of the alleged offenses. The teenager attended Keller Central High School, while Bearden taught at Hillwood Middle School, also in the Keller ISD.

An arrest warrant for Improper Relationship Between Educator/Student was issued for Bearden, who turned himself in to the North Richland Hills Jail on January 5.