Locksmith - November 2007

Stuyvesant High School’s Key Club

The Locksmith Caring—Our Way of Life

Volume 3, Issue 2 November 2007

INSIDE THIS ISSUE: ACS Flyer tribution

Dis-

2-3

ACS Health Fair

Scared Silly Walk

4 5 6 7

UNICEF Boxes

8

It’s My Park Day MSABC

9 10

In Reflection...

Race to Deliver

11 12

Bowl-O-Rama Crossword Word Search

Picture of the Month!

134

Upcoming Events •

Joe K 10K Walk Dec. 9

•

JCC Wrap It Up Dec. 12

•

Holiday 4 MilerDec. 15

•

Bake Sale Dec. 18

•

MORE TO COME!

Important Key Club Information!

The Cabinet Richard Huang (President) Sue Yee Chen (Vice President) Anthony Choi (Secretary) Olivia Hu (Treasurer) Ashley Cheng (Editor) Official Stuy Key Club E-mail stuykc@yahoo.com

The Board Jane Yang & Shadia Kim (Advocacy) Cissy Lin & Connie Liu (Art) Anne Tsay & Irene Kho (Fundraising)

Joanna Chen & Pei Xiong Liu (Locksmith) Rachel Dekhterman & Judith Chow (New Projects) Jing W. Xiao & Snigdha Das (Public Relations) Gavin Huang & Victor Ma (Web)

Send articles and pictures to locksmith@stuykc.org Visit our website stuykc.org

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2

ACS FLYER DISTRIBUTION It was nine o’ clock on a Saturday morning. Normally, at this time, I’d be struggling to get up. But today, I found myself quite distant from my bed. I was at the Brooklyn Chinese Baptist Church on 8th Avenue, ready to help out with the American Cancer Society (ACS) flyer distribution.

One by one, other Key Clubbers arrived. Before we went to distribute flyers, however, we were asked to set up the third floor of the church for an American Cancer Society Health Fair that was about to take place. Moving the chairs and tables was easy, but blowing up balloons turned out to be a trickier task than I had expected. We quickly faced our first problem as we couldn’t figure out how to work those three gigantic helium-filled tanks. We tried turning the knob on the tank as many times as we could, but nothing happened.

Just when we were about to give up, someone accidentally squeezed the nozzle and the red balloon that we had slipped on to it magically inflated. Hooray!

But then there were more problems. Some of our balloons suffered from lack of helium while others looked like they were ready to explode at any moment. Fortunately, as we became more and more experienced, our balloons looked more and more like decorations. We quickly found out that the white ACS balloons were much more forgiving than the colored balloons. Though the ACS balloons were thicker and harder to tie up, they were also less likely to give “popping” surprises. Tying the ribbons to balloons was also challenging. One second of mindlessness and the balloon drifts to the ceiling, waiting for one of us to climb onto a chair and escort it down. Who knew blowing up balloons would be so hard?

Finally, after working cautiously for more than one hour and popping 12 balloons in the process, we managed to decorate the room with colorful balloons. Relieved, we all raced downstairs, where piles of flyers and bags of cute little pack of tissues awaited us. We decide to split up and spread out on 8th Avenue. As I soon discovered distributing the flyers minutes later, most people were more interested in the tissues than the flyers. I was outraged by people who grabbed the stuff I handed to them and threw away the flyer right in front of me, keeping only the tissues. There was also a lady who came strolling down the street, collecting the flyers and tissues from each of us. Even more amusing was an old man who asked me if he could get only the tissue but not the flyer. I decided to grant his wish, but I didn’t forget to tell him to go check out the health fair back at the church.

As the tissues began to run out, so did my luck. My frustration grew as more and more people passed by without even looking at me, which made me feel extremely guilty since I am often one of those people who use the ignorance method against flyer distributors. Still, I kept my composure and gave a cheerful “Thank you!” to anyone who accepted the flyers. I was thrilled every time I successfully gave away a flyer, especially to someone who said “Thank you” to me.

By the time I ran out of flyers and made my way back to the church, where I rejoined other Key Clubbers, the third floor was already stuffed with people. As tiring as it had been trying to give out all those flyers, I felt satisfied seeing all the people who had showed up at the health fair. Furthermore, I definitely learned something valuable today – a simple “Thank you!” can really lighten up a desperate flyer distributor!

- Zoe Wu

Page 2

ACS

F ly er

Distribu tion

It was late morning when I stepped off the train at the bustling 8th Avenue stop. Clumsily, I pushed my way through the massive crowd of people. A small group of fellow Key Clubbers were already gathered on the street, and I approached them with a loud “Boomba!” cheer. While I signed the attendance sheet, the project captain explained to me that we would be starting in a short while, as soon as Richard arrived with the flyers. We played “numbers” to pass the time, and after a few intense rounds, Richard finally appeared with a large cardboard box full of flyers.

Each of us took a batch of the colorful flyers and made our way onto the streets. Considering the flyers were written in Chinese, I could not decipher anything that was written. However, I knew that they were promoting the upcoming American Cancer Society Brooklyn Family Health Day. Sponsored by the famous American Cancer Society, this event was going to be very important. People could come and be tested for various types of cancer, because one of the strongest weapons against cancer is early detection.

All around me, many Key Clubbers placed flyers in the windows of cars or on the doors of local businesses. I, however, chose to give mine out directly to the people on the streets. Due to the frustrating language barrier that I faced in this predominantly Asian neighborhood, I could not verbally convince anybody to come to the event. Instead, I flashed a big smile at every person that walked by and handed him or her a flyer. Hopefully, that was enough to convince at least some of them to attend the American Cancer Brooklyn Family Health Day and learn about early detection.

-Loren Oumarova

Page 3 THE LOCKSMITH

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2

“Good Morning! Please take a flier…”

If you were walking along the streets of Eighth Avenue on Saturday, October 13, 2007, you may have noticed many colorful fliers lying on the ground, or flying in the wind, or in the hands of volunteers with very colorful and pretty nametags. What’s the meaning of this? It’s the annual health fair of course!

On this day, the American Cancer Society Asian Initiatives hosted a health fair in a nearby church where many sponsors gathered to offer their services to the local residents. These services ranged from free nicotine patches for those seeking to quit smoking, to free mammograms for women, to health insurance plans for those who needed them, and more. To insure the success of this health fair, the volunteers and I had a fairly simple mission: to roam the streets of Eighth Avenue and to distribute fliers to everyone. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Not so much.

We headed out at 10 AM aimed and ready. We targeted everyone in sight—shoppers, smokers, drivers, husbands, wives, and even children— no one was spared. We surrounded people to insure that they would take a flier, and we secretly made a pact with the children to give them balloons in exchange for them to persuade their parents to attend the fair. We chased after shoppers and placed fliers in their bags; we went up to drivers in their cars and slipped fliers through their windows; we ambushed smokers to tell them about the benefits of quitting; we won over smokers’ wives who later forced their husbands to get free nicotine patches; we pursued everyone down until our ammunition was used up, and in the end, It was only 11 o’clock.

We headed back to the church and what’s this? The church was jammed-packed! Everyone was taking advantage of the free services, not to mention the children “taking advantage” of the “free” balloons we worked so hard to set up. We saw wives heading to the free nicotine patch table while holding their husbands by the ear, and we saw many people whom we gave out fliers to on the street thanking us for telling them about the fair. As we were just about to take a break, we were informed that a thousand more copies of the fliers were made. Awesome!

Reload for round two!

If you didn’t go to the fair, you missed out on your one-in-a-lifetime chance to receive a free, stuffed, Fidelity dinosaur. You know you want the dinosaur. It’s green…

-Kenny Yu

Page 4

A C S

H E A L T H

F A I R

It ‘s My

Park Day

Among the sea of ways I could have spent my summer, I chose a relatively humble option: toiling for six hours in Flushing everyday for the local councilman. I did not sit in an office chair, I did not do any mindless typing, nor did I answer phone calls. Instead, I was sent to work outside to do community service, to pick up trash, to paint over graffiti, and to clean up local parks. The councilman, John Liu, would not stop telling us that politicians were public servants, that he had started his political career doing the exact same things we did, doing the exact same grueling hard work we were doing. I never forgot what he wouldn’t stop telling us, and I still keep in touch with him and his office for community service opportunities.

They invited me to join them in a tree planting event at Kissena Park in October. The tree planting, It’s My Park Day, was part of an initiative by the city government to plant one million trees in parks throughout the city. Their goal was to plant a thousand trees in Kissena park in one day, a large feat that required many dedicated volunteers.

From my experiences at New Visions Garden, I was more than excited to attend, even if the commute took an hour, but I wondered how I could help further. I decided that this could make a great Key Club event because this was the sort of community work that members expected to do in Key Club along with the traditional clean-ups and soup kitchens. So I called the councilman’s office and told them to expect fifteen teenagers ready to work. They told me that we would have to represent their office at the event instead of our own organizational entity. I felt awkward wearing a shirt that said Member of Councilman John Liu’s office, especially when there were several other Key Clubs at the event, but when we started working, our affiliations didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that we were from Stuy and they were from Bayside High School Key Club or Townsend Harris High School. It didn’t even matter that we weren’t representing our own KeWe were all in the same club: the community. We had the same goals and the same aspirations. We were all there to plant trees. We were all there to create a better community. Even the councilman blended in with the volunteers.

In three hours, a force of three hundred volunteers transformed a massive empty lot into a massive sea of tree sprouts. Our group was the last to leave.

As we left, a park ranger told us, “Come back in ten years, and see how much your tree grew.”

-Gavin Huang

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Page 6

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2

Hope Starts With Me One by one we all go up to a grab a bright green shirt.

And on that shirt is a ribbon and some words.

Words of inspiration, of someone who may have been hurt.

It clearly says hope starts with me, But this is something I cannot believe.

How can one person change how things are just to be?

How can one person give hope to the world?

The question stays as I walk through the park Looking at the leaves around me just twirl.

Hope is such a strong word, filled with emotion, A word meaning to expect with confidence, But where’s my confidence and my devotion?

So I stand and look at all the people walk, Thinking how can hope start with me?

This must just all be foolish talk.

I count the pink items fly on by.

Does hope start with them?

Those that have cried and survived?

Because when I think about it, Simply in black and white.

Hope can’t start with me, I would just quit.

Then I see their smiling faces and all the hope inside, Maybe this hope begins with all of us.

Those who have ever made a single stride.

A stride for hope, a type of decree; To say this will not bring us down.

And in the end, hope does start with me.

-Helen Song

MAKING STRIDES AGAINST BREAST CANCER

Halloween Scared Silly Walk I Wouldn’t Enter if I Were You…

truly, a sense of ominous dread

Can you recall the times of innocence,

gave the whole ordeal a Halloween flair.

of the Halloweens we once held dear,

Tour guides stayed out for the entire event,

of tricktrick-oror-treating for dentist appointments,

enduring the showers of rain.

of plastic bloodblood-induced fear?

Around 4 o’clock, we headed back to the rink

An event that’s been run for seven years now

where hot food greeted our pain.

was, unfortunately, held on a rainy day.

Actors washed away their makemake-up

As I realized how scarce the Key Club members were, and tore off their costumes and rags. my balloon of enthusiasm simply floated away.

Everyone enjoyed a warm, filling meal

But beware, I warn you, of the frightful ghouls,

after an noon of Halloween gags.

of the werewolves that haunt the hills.

If ever you should want to be scared

There would always be a witch lurking behind a tree

or have your toddler brother wet his pants,

and vampires that would give you the chills.

simply come to Prospect Park’s Scared Silly Walk.

Our duty was to lead groups of children,

To those with weak stomachs: don’t take the chance.

clad in their Halloween gear

-Bette Ha

through the winding forest of medieval horrors, ensuring that they stayed near.

Performers stayed true to their roles, and with eerie music wafting through the air, Page 7 THE LOCKSMITH

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2

Page 8

UNICEF Collection Many of you may have noticed the many people around the school that were carrying around small orange boxes, which when shaken produced the sound of jiggling coins. Those boxes were from UNICEF. Stuyvesant Key Club, like many other Key Clubs and organizations, has traditionally helped fundraise for UNICEF. Every year these boxes are distributed around October. This year has been no different, and the results have been very successful. From the money collected by Key Club’s dedicated members and the proceeds from the bake sale, Stuyvesant Key Club has fundraised $1,200 towards UNICEF. Those of you who carried the boxes around with you throughout the day, actively or passively attempting to draw bystanders to donate, and those of you who donated to others that were carrying boxes—your efforts will not go unforgotten. . Know that for every cent and penny fundraised or donated, an unfortunate, deserving kid in some underdeveloped country will be able to receive aid that he or she desperately needs. Thank you.

James Gu

**Amount raised**

$1200 !You guys are amazing!

Being a freshman at Stuy, I decided to join Key Club to see what it was all about. At first, I was awed by all the different things we could do in order to reach a certain goal—to serve the community. As days turned to weeks and the weeks into months, three months of school have flown by. During this time, I have come to realize how powerful Key Club is, service-wise and spiritwise. The people that make up Key Club are not only intelligent, diligent individuals, but also kind hearted, goofy high school students. Their effort and enthusiasm made Key Club a hit during the months of October and November.

Key club week, which took place November 11 to 17, proved to be a huge success.

Rainbows of different colored Key club volunteer shirts filled the halls, and the word “hey”, written in different colors and handwriting, was scrawled all over the posters put up in school. Shouts of “BOOMBA!” filled the halls, and “much love” was given to the beaver.

Key Club week helped provide a sort of shelter, where all Key Club members could feel united through the random, yet entertaining activities.

Also, we cannot forget the candy sellers, those who have helped raise hundreds of dollars, receiving service points, of course, for their dedicated and hard core selling. These members lug around huge boxes and just keep coming back to sell more. Their efforts have so far helped make our contributions to UNICEF and the Brock Project possible.. They also are appreciated for another reason, appearing all around the school to satisfy our candy cravings.

Finally, we simply must congratulate those who have gone out of their way on weekends on freezing cold mornings to serve our community. Many Key Clubbers woke up early, giving up their Saturdays to help marathon runners and to help clean up the park, all in 30 degree weather!

So, I must congratulate all of us who have contributed to Key Club and have made it possible to keep the club thriving at Stuyvesant High School. The beginning of this year’s Key Club is proving to be a success, and much more excitement will surely follow. Giving our time and energy to performing community service not only benefits the community as a whole, but us as individuals as well. It reflects our kindness and generosity. All of us Key Clubbers deserve a “pat on the back” for our hard work. “BOOMBA!” -Rebecca Kim

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Page 10 VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2

This was the first event that I actually went to. I had set my alarm to 5:45 so that I could get to the event at 7:30 A.M. and let me tell you, it was totally worth it! Unfortunately, this reporter was actually an hour late for the event. But not late enough to miss helping out, first at the Kid Races and then at the Adult Races! I signed in, got an orange vest, and began to help out. To see those little legs run a quarter mile was so adorable! We rooted for those babies like crazy. Then, it was time for the Adult Races.

One of the workers there asked for some volunteers so my friends and I decided to see what his assignment was. He told us that it was an extremely boring job, where we would be required to do nothing but watch the clocks for about two hours. Yet, we happily accepted! He walked us to his red truck and had us sit in the luggage area.

Then we were off to our positions with our heads zooming in the biting cold as the vehicle drove us to the first mile checkpoint. My friend and I got off while our other two friends went to the last checkpoint.

The man set the clock up and told us (Amy and I) to wait for another man to start the clocks at the start of the race, which would be in an hour. So, we had an hour to kill and were stranded somewhere in Central Park. All we knew was that we were near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Our feet were getting frostbitten and we were playing tic tac toe on a gum wrapper. We began watching the first episode of Laguna Beach and were actually half way through when finally some people came and started the clock up. Then the races began! Hundreds and hundreds of people were in the freezing cold and running miles! It was a sight to see. After about twenty minutes, the races ended and we headed back to the bandshell. We returned home with a free tee, breakfast, and happiness!

-Ruchi Jain

Thanks to everyone who came! We hope you had a ton of fun. we’ve got a lot more fundraising events coming up, including ice-skating.

So, get pumped!!!

Bowl-O-Rama Page 11

THE LOCKSMITH

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2 Crossword

Page 12

Word Search It’s

Getting Cold!

By: Jensen Cheong D D B J F N B R O W N L E A V E S M S W W D X U O

O A K H P O Z A H O O Y N A A X B E E I I E T U O

P B A H A E F O E M O T I L R B Y A T N D E E J L

I T L D J G P I D A T S D A T M U N R T U L Q K T

S J H N M L X L R S W H G I W E U T S E F I V E O

MITTENS HOT CHOCOLATE SWEATPANTS SWEATERS EARMUFFS HATS GLOVES FIREPLACE THANKSGIVING RUNNY NOSES

K O F P E I A K N E N H G G A N N F O R T N N L H

J Y N E H B T U A U P E U S A Q D A F I E R E Y Q

M I I L I E G T O O O L P H S S E W N S A E E R I

Z M E Z N G E B E O T G A O T P O N H N R Z D E N

F E V O L R D C L N E A B C T E J D J E S I J E S

J V D I S U F U P I S I B K E N R S I A H M M C H

N P N V I E Z A U D D A E E E T G W S R I M P A O

V G X U K A Q E E R U N N Y N O S E S T E D E M R

H E A G Z A P E H B T N I T C Y O A I G C F R X T

P T P G L I A Q I E O T N I O E I T N H O O I L E

L T I I H O T C H O C O L A T E Z P J M Y R F L R

K I E M A U V R N C H S G H N S N A U T U L O T D

I N V A E Y N E S O I S T O S O G N R F U A D H A

V G X T H A N K S G I V I N G T T T E R L U A I Y

D A V B W B N T W M S M H N E E R S R O D N S E S

Z C W L N G E S A I T I I P N R E I D O B M I R G

F O Z I Y K A T N N O I E E S D E T A T E I V E W

N L Y E C D K I Q G K G I T U S A E R A S E A Q O

M D C A B O A F T S R H Y E K R U T T S A O R S R

Q A J B G O Y T T F O T R H S A T E I M I U G N A

WINTER IS NEAR JACKETS ROAST TURKEY FLURRIES SNUGGLING BROWN LEAVES BARE TREES SKIING HOCKEY GETTING A COLD SHORTER DAYS

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