My internship

My internship I did in the "Socialinės paramos centras" in Vilnius. This service was established by the Lithuanian government so all support it gets from the government. It means that support depends on the economical state of Lithuania.

I chose this service because I wanted to do something more difficult and to get more experience than I got during my first internship in "Matulaičio socialinės paromos centras". I thought that working with families will give me more knowledge and will be more challenging than work with children.

Before going to my internship I conceived a plan of aims that I was planning to achieve. So my aims were: first, to learn how to use theoretic knowledge during internship; second, to get more experience working with clients; third, to improve abilities of communication.

During my internship in a “Socialinės paramos centras” I had few activities.
First of all with a social worker I had to go to visit families. It was good opportunity to see how poor people live. Second activity was to try to make individual plans how to help for families.

At first sight my internship was not challenging but on the other hand it was really arduous work. All the time I was visiting asocial families. Most of places where families lived were in a really bad condition: the furniture were very old or broken, the smell there was awful, sometimes for me it was even quite hard to stay in their apartments longer than few minutes. Other disadvantage of my training was that I almost could not help for those families, I just could watch how social worker works. On the other hand, it gave me quite a lot of experience. Unfortunately, I discovered that social worker's job is really dangerous because most of the time social workers go alone to visit families.
They do not know how people will react to them and how they will behave.

Fortunately, there are not just disadvantages of my internship. So advantages off course would be experience and knowledge that I got from social worker. It was very nice and useful that social worker was explaining to me everything what she was doing, also she helped me by giving me her own opinion and sharing with me her own experience.
Other quite important advantage is that I realized how happy I am, I started more appreciate what I have. I realized that I have everything what is most significant: family, friends, place where to live, enough money, also all opportunities to study. Also while going to asocial families I saw that there are a lot of people who need social worker's help. I realized how our profession is important.

To sum up, I think internship is really useful, it gives us a lot of experience which we can not get during lectures at university. The internship is the opportunity to study not just from books but also from a real life.

Racial Discrimination

Most of people think that racial discrimination problem was topical in the past but it is not true. There are still countries which discriminate people who are different race so it means that this problem still exists.

As ideology racism existed during the 19th century. It was attempted to provide a racial classification of humanity. Racial discrimination was especially topical during
World War II and the Holocaust.

There are even some types of discrimination, for example, institutional racism or state racism, economical racism and etc. I think most important for us is institutional racism because each of us can suffer from it. So institutional racism is racial discrimination by government, corporations, educational institutions or other organizations which have power to affect people. Economical racism is caused by education or parent's generation.

The first declaration against racial discrimination was created in the 18th century in the United States. It was in the United States Declaration of Independency. In 2000, the European Union banned racism along with other forms of discrimination such as genetic features, religion or belief, age, sexual orientation and etc.

Researchers say that racial discrimination problem is widespread especially in the
United States. Usually discrimination there is in the workplace against job applicants whose names sounds as "black people" name.

In conclusion, racial discrimination as shows many researches and history is very old problem which is still not resolved, despite the fact that this problem was topical a lot of centuries. It shows how deep this problem is and how it is difficult to resolve it.

The Eldery Abuse

Nowadays elderly abuse is increasing quite fast. There are more and more people who commit acts of violence against the elderly and who do not respect them.

So the elderly abuse is an act when someone causes harm or distress to an old person. It is really cruel act against people who can not defend themselves from abusers because most of the elderly are too weak to do it. Elderly abuse is a prevalent problem because mental or physical impairment of elderly may prevent victim from reporting the problem. Usually abusers are relatives who are responsible for caring an elderly person. Also victims can be social workers, friends, neighbors or volunteers.

There are a lot of types of elderly abuse. The first, the most common, is financial exploitation. It is illegal use of person's property, money and pension. The second one is psychological abuse - it is shouting, ignoring, blaming, threatening and etc. The third, of most common, is physical abuse. This includes any type of action that creates bodily harm or distress, for example, hitting, punching, pushing, giving too much medication or wrong medication. There are also other types of abuse like neglect, sexual abuse, self neglect but these types are not as common as the first three.

To sum up, the elderly abuse is a problem which has to be resolved as fast as possible because there are a lot of the elderly who need help, who suffer from their own children, partners.

Self Assessement

This month, people around the world are looking to the night skies 2007 10 10
mp3/se-sin-2453-digest-10-09-07.mp3
http://www.voanews.com/mediasets/specialenglish/2007 10/audio

I was listening radio broadcast which consists of three interesting topics.

This broadcast I have listened two times and one time I read written version of this broadcast in order to check if I understood everything right. It shows that I am not very good at listening tasks. I think main reason why I have this problem is because I do not have enough experience of doing it. Also it shows that to me is difficult to concentrate while I am doing this kind of tasks.

These three topics were really interesting to me so it was not very difficult to understand what was said in this radio broadcast. Of course, there were words I did not know. So as I mentioned before after listening I have read written version. It means that my vocabulary is still quite poor and I have to study even harder if I want to pass my English exam good. I think it is very important to know a lot of words because just using a lot of words language looks nicer and not so poor as mine.

However, I think I managed to do this task quite good because as a foreigner I understood
quite a lot.

Choosing a Student Exchange Program to Come to the US

A student exchange program is good opportunity to those people who want to see other countries, to improve language knowledge, to find out more about other country's culture. It is also helps to become more independent, to grow-up.
On the other hand, to my opinion sometimes this program can be not very good and especially for those students who do not have enough money for living because it was said that the money they earn from their work may not be enough to pay all their costs. It means that to go on this kind of program is quite risky and sometimes it can become even dangerous. For example if you are going to country that is quite far is not safe because you absolutely do not know their culture. It would be difficult to become part of that society.
I would like to go to European countries but not to US because I do not feel enough independent and I would feel not safe so far from my home. Moreover, i would scare to go to country like US because if something happened my family would be far from me.

Virginia Tech: As Strong As It's Always Been

At Virginia university in April 16 of this year 23 years old man Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people and later committed a suicide. He was in his final year at college.
After one week mourning finished and students again started to go to university. Everybody are trying to forget that event and to act as if nothing have happened. I was amazed to hear and read that director of undergraduate admissions has received e-mails and notes from some students who say they want to be part of Virginia Tech now more than ever. I can not understand how people can be so stupid, even so lip-deep. Moreover, it was strange to hear that foreign students are not rejecting admission offers because of the shootings at university. If i were one of those students i would reject that admission offers. I would scare that this tragedy can happen again. I'm surprised that other students do not care about their lives enough. Also it was quite sad for me to hear that university officials did not react more quickly and did not warn about a gunman at university in time. Maybe this mistake which they did caused this tragedy.
In conclusion, I want to say that I do hope that this tragedy will never happen again.

Employment law

Summary

First step of protecting employees and self-employed was legislation which safeguard rights of working people. In the 20th century after governments payed more attention to the employment law it became more modern and regulated all employees and self-employed.
There are quite big variety of the employment rights, all rights are guaranteed by the Employment Protection Act. So in most of the richest countries it is guaranteed that all employees get a minimum wage, a compensation if they were dismissed unfairly, a week's notice if employer want to dismiss his worker. One of most important rights is that men and women are equal, it means they have the same possibility to get job. Naturally, there have to be equality for all employees to get a job despite their sex or race. Also employment law includes rights for women who decide to have a baby during their works. They have right to come back after birth to their previous job.
Most issues raise the right to strike and Sunday trading. The right to strike is legal just then majority of employees agree with it. For employers strikes are quite damaging cause because they lose money but for workers sometimes it is the best way how to get better working conditions. Sunday trading is allowed in most European countries just there is some restrictions on it.
Employment law in Japan is lower than in many Western countries. In Japan women do not have the same rights to get job as in Western countries. The Japanese work a lot of hours and usually they do not get overtime payment. On the other hand, the Japanese employees sometimes have better labour conditions than Western workers. They are more certain that they will not be dismissed. Also one of spouses have right to get compensation if his wife/husband died because of stress that was caused by overwork.