Dear all,

Now is the time when young people raise their voice to speak up for their rights. Astra Youth – a group of young activists working in the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Balkan Countries has a pleasure to present its manifesto at the launch of the YES campaign promoting condom use.

We say YES to safer sex
YES to condoms
YES to informed choices
YES to reliable information
YES to Youth Educated Sexually


Astra Youth developed its campaign on safer sex because the group is extremely alarmed by the lack of relevant preventative policies targeted at youth in our region. In many countries, sexuality is still a taboo and by these means access to comprehensive information and service limited which makes youth especially vulnerable for contracting sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS, as well as teenage pregnancy. With our campaign we would like to reach sexually active young people. We strongly believe that it is our right to enjoy safer sex!

If you would like to strengthen our YES voice, please follow the link to find more information about YES Campaign and sign up our manifesto: http://www.astra.org.pl/articles.php?id=156

We appreciate your attention and encourage you to forward the above information on this initiative to your contacts. Let’s prove that young people can stand for better/safer world for themselves and for future generations!

This statement, signed by thousands (we hope) of young people will help us to advocate for comprehensive sexuality education for all. ASTRA Youth team is planning to send YES message to as many policy makers and officials all of the world as possible to draw their attention to this burning issue. Astra Youth also hopes that this initiative will make youth more active in the area of their sexual and reproductive health and rights, which are so linked to HIV/AIDS prevention.


Thank you for your support!
ASTRA Youth

Hello Dear Readers!

As today is the 2nd day of Christmas there is still time for me to wish everybody lots of love, peace & happiness these days and during the rest of the year as well :-).

Moreover, for the Polish-speaking members there is a gift - a great opportunity to contribute to TIG community, gain some experience and do smth interesting in your free time. In close future there will be launched a Polish version of the TIG website and right now we are looking for volunteers willing to help in translations. Why is it a gift? Because:

1) You improve your English

2) You gain experience in translating and using online translation tools

3) You learn a lot:
a) about surrounding world from the texts you translate
b) about conveying ideas from one language code to another
c) html (here you learn a little, but still it's worth :-))

4) You have fun when translating smth requiring use of your imagination...

5) ...and satisfaction when translating smth requiring lots of effort and knowledge

6) If you are the most active volunteer of the month (so called "stachanowiec" :-)) you can be rewarded with $100


So... RODACY DO PRACY!!*




Soon you will receive a letter from TIG Multilingual Programs Coordinator Axel Van Goud explaining details concerning the project together with a Guide to Translation (here you can find some hints how to translate etc). If you feel interested, contact Axel (AXEL@takingitglobal.org) or me (Annad@takingitglobal.org). Looking forward to your enthusiastic replies! :-)



*If you didn't understand the phrase, but:

1) You are a dedicated amateur of Polish people, culture, language, pierogi :-) etc and have Polish friends

2) You just have Polish friends

you can still contribute by spreading this information :-)

Hello Dear Friends!

This first entry on my blog I would like to dedicate to a great initiative of the Russian Centre of Culture and Science in Gdansk and my friend Max Frydryk, which was launching a film club "Stalker" - a club bringing together people interested in cinema and Russian culture or just curious about something different than the mainstream offer.

Every three weeks, usually on Friday afternoons, there is organized a movie show in the Russian Centre (ul. Dluga 35, Gdansk) and it is worth mentioning that the club focuses on the contemporary cinema and the most recent achievements of Russian cinematography. On the other hand, it is possible "to make an order" - every request will be taken into consideration and one of the next shows can be dedicated to the movie you asked for... Before each show there is a small introduction - a couple of interesting facts about the director and the movie itself (my little contribution :-)) and ALL the movies have subtitles in Polish (also partly my future contribution), so don't feel discouraged if you don't speak Russian. The entrance is free and everybody is invited - in future we want to create a group of regular club members, though every time new people are welcome!

For more information check the website of the club: http://www.rosja.edu.pl/klub/index.htm

During our the next meeting (28th Dec) we will watch "Nochnoi Dozor" (Night Watch) - one of the most popular Russian movies of the last decade, so, if you feel interested - hope to see you there! :-)

Yours,
Ania

Today, I would like to involve you in an important campaign.

Recently I became a member of the European Advisory Group of the liberal organization Catholics for a Free Choice.

Their recent campaign is Condoms for Life and part of this campaign is a letter to Pope Benedict XVI, asking him to lift the ban on condom use for HIV prevention.
I strongly encourage you to read the letter and sign it if you agree, even if you are not Catholic and pass this information to others.

The campaign is especially important for people in Catholic countries like mine, where many people still listen to and follow the Church preachings.

Here's the link

Thank you for your interest.

Celebrate The Internet

OneWebDay is a day for the glob to celebrae the Web and its importance to our lives. The first one is being held today in many places around the world. People are expected to celebrate by orgnizing events, bloging etc.

I take this to highlight how the web affected my life. Since my friend Adam taught me the basics of internet my life has changed dramatically. Every thing has improved to better, from special and personal life, to education to work. I participated in prestigious conferences, I posted some of my research work, and if not the Web I would not be able even to know about the opportunities of participating. I got valuable feed back from colleague scholars on other parts of the globe.

Last year I got married to my lovely wife who first I met through this international online organization of youth TIG. Family and friends got the happy news online. Of course, today she cooked a delicious dinner as a celebration of OneWebDay :).

Recently I started my online art project – The Colorful Days - in which I paint dates. Web was behind the inspiration I got for the art. I was reading blogs about current art projects and I found a successful and amazingnline art project. The power of web is the back bone of my project, for instance, I use free wikipedia information for my site.

Thank you very much Susan Crawford for starting OneWebDay.

From my side I want to participate in celebrating and supporting the first OneWebDay. I added 22 September to the special dates I will sell the 22 September painting on online auction. If I sell it, I will denoate 60% of the money to OneWebDay.

In the last 3 weeks many interesting things happened. I sold 7 days ... well let us say the first week has been sold.

These are the 7 days being sold:
28 September, 1 January, 8 July , 5 February, 10 August and 30 August. We gave our first customer across the Atlantic, a free day, he choose 11 September.

Every one has his day, but there are only 366 colorful days in the world, so have one of The Colorful Days of the world.

Please help me reach the guys who may be interested in the colorful days; please spread the word, may be one of your friends will be happy to know about this project. Please let me hear from you through TIG messenger or to the project email " ali@thecolorfuldays.com ".

Have a nice day ...

Some of you may know that I am selling days. Every day in the Gregorian calendarwill be sold and painted. There are only 366 days, every day will be painted only once.

Feel free to check the site and don't hesitate to order one of the colorful days of the world. Please do not forget to tell your friends about this project, especially those who may like the idea.

One of the interesting blogs that I cannot stop reading is Sala's blog because I am learning a lot from there. He is the artist behind two art achievements, first the onethousandpaintings and the other is the web based art "web site as graphs". His first work is about painting the numbers from 1 to 1000. What is interesting in it is that the price of the painting is determined by the number reduced from 1000. He is bringing success to his experiment of art and mathematics. He sold around 572 in 5 months.

The second work is HTML based; Sala created an applet that is able to reflect websites’ structures into beautiful shapes. While the first work is a highly pure conceptual art, the second crystallizes that area of art when technology is successfully used in bringing to existence the beauty and aesthetics around us which we cannot feel with our limited senses.

Moreover, booth of the works shares the core point, the essence and simplicity of mathematics. The applet Sala produced brings the abstraction, idealism, purity and completeness of mathematics behind HTML technologies, from editors to browsers, and that adds to the value of the graphs produced - from an art point of view.

For every one who is interested in today's art such work is of high importance, it is living creation of art history.

It is the inspirational power of Sala's work that led me to lunch the colorful days project.

Press conference organized by my group PONTON to promote the summer hotline for teenagers. From the left: me, group coordinator Ola, sexologist expert Alicja, and PONTON volunteer Marta

My group has launched a summer project called "Summer Emergency Hotline." Every day until the end of September a volunteer has a four-hour duty during which she or he answers phone calls, or calls people back to talk to them if they don't have enough money to make a longer call on a cell phone, or answers questions posted through text messages.

Our objective is to provide information about sexuality, contraception and prevention. We though that a phone hotline would be a good addition to our usual method of answering quaestion through emails, especially in the summer, when young people are spending time away from home, and Internet access.

To promote the action, we organized a press conference. The announcements about the hotline have been posted on the websites of other NGOs, and on the radio. Some journalists from dailies and TV became more interested in the project and took some additional photos, and arranged interviews with our group coordinator. We also had stickers with the telephone number printed and placed in buses and clubs.

So far the hotline has been very popular.

I am adding more features to the website, and it is developing little by little, I will keep improving the site as days pass. Yesterday I added an example of how a colorful day may look like. I have also added some FAQ, and today I lunched the pricing system of the project, its based on 8 July the starting day of the project.

The colorful days project is an art project, the goal is to sell painitngs with days of year, every day will be painted once. For more details check the project web site www.thecolorfuldays.com.

8 July is my birthday, and I am celebrating it by announcing the colorful days art project. The project is about creating 366 paintings each painting represents one day of the days from 1st January to 31st December in a leap year. The buyer decides the color of the day, the color can be any one of the colors of the visible light spectrum ( red; orange; yellow; green; cyan; blue; violet). Paintings are designed to use colors and lines to tell about their creation history and relations between them. In such way every pianting will be unique and at the same time linked to the other paintings. Now I am going to the birth day praty. My wife, me and some friends will celebrate booth my date birth and the birth of this project. Best wishes for all those who are celebrating their births today, namly TIG members. BTW, here is the cool card that I have got from TIG, thanks :). Note: the project web site is located at www.thecolorfuldays.com, enjoy.

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Thank you for the birthday card! It has been a really great day, not only because it's my birthday... I have also finished my studies today!!! Hurray!!! I'm a new MA!