Busy TYs

It was a sort of culture shock to be back in school last Monday morning after only arriving back from Spain on Sunday night, I miss it so much! Its nice to be back eating regular food though, and of course experiencing the gorgeous Irish weather... not. Alot of stuff has been happening over the last two weeks in our TY lives:
Last Wednesday we were given a drumming workshop by a man named Dave who was really talented at playing the drums and he gave us an interesting workshop for the whole day, my hands were sore at the end of it! We got to use different instruments from the percussion family which were from different parts of Africa and were decorated beautifully with different skins, threads and patterns. I really enjoyed the workshop because I'm realy interested in the rhythmic aspect of music and I thought that it was great that we got to try something new.
On Thursday the author Debbie Thomas came in to speak to us about creative writing and gave us tips on how to write a good story. She was really lovely and I found her to be quite inspirational - she has written children books of her own and is a successful author, something that I'd love to be perhaps when I finish college.
Yesterday we had a film workshop in the library where all of the TYs watched a film called 'Sometimes In April' which was a film highlighting the genocide which occured in 1994 in Rwanda in Africa. It involved two tribes in Africa who were having a civil argument in which over 100 days, 1 million people were brutally murdered. I found the film to be upsetting at parts, for example a seen where a group of school girls of about our age were shot, but for the mostpart I enjoyed it and I think it had a very strong message. I feel it was important for us, the TYs, to see this film so that we realise that the misfortunate people in Africa and of different parts of the Third World need our help and that although not always publicised, there is a tremendous amount of injustice and in-equality still in many parts of our world. An example of recently publicity is the hype around criminal Kony, which many people are now more aware of thanks to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. I'd like to finish this this blog post with a quote which I felt was very powerful from the film - ''We are sisters, we will stay together''.