Volunteer and Italian Families- Blog #6

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I think that the community service was added into our course because it shows that we appreciate this country just as much as the native people here do. It definitely gives you a warming feeling for trying to help make this land a nicer place. Plus Italy has treated me and the group I came with so well. Why would I not give back to this beautiful land, she deserves it. Overall it is a positive outcome for you and others to see that you are not greedy, selfish, and unappreciative of what you have. It looks good now and it will definitely look good in the future. For the community service we went to a park with Antonio to paint over graffiti. They were on two of theses brick walls that you can sit on to relax. We also swept up the dead leaves and mini acorns that surrounded the wall. It got to a point that I was having too much fun painting. The volunteer people broke us up into two groups of ten. The first group had a small wall while the second group had a longer one. I was with the second group with the longer wall; we took a little bit longer to complete our wall because not all of us had a paintbrush. The lady that was over our group complimented me on how I was painting the wall, I felt like the next big thing coming out of Florence. Luckily the lady just wanted us to just paint over the graffiti and not the entire wall, otherwise we would not have finished on time. Once we were done we met back up with the first group and saw their wall because they finished way before we did and it looked like professionals did it. I mean the whole wall was completely transform they literally outdid our wall by a long shot. I really enjoyed this exercise, it just makes you put things into a different perspective. The people over here really care about their city and it is just a beautiful thing to see and be a part of.

Today at school I learned that Italian families have some similarities with American families with raising their children. At the same there are some differences as well. Dr. Sarti, an Italian pediatrician, gave us a lecture about the Italian parenting and the rate of children being raised. With the similarities I do think that the rate of children being born is definitely starting to decrease in America and Italy. I know that I do not want any kids right now simply because I am not mentally ready to raise another human being. There are a lot of women and men who feel this way. However I do want a family but far down into the future when I am financially stable and finish living for me. With my generation we have so much ambition and are very goal oriented. I know for a fact after college I just want to travel the world and become bougie for myself. I do think that the ages are different for childbirth in American than in Italy. In Italy the ages of women mainly giving birth to a child ranges from 35-40, and that blew my mind. In America I think the age ranges from 25-30 for women giving birth to a child. Another thing that Dr. Sarti mentioned that caught my attention is that people are either having just one child or not having kids at all in Italy. If I remember correctly I think he said because people do not want to deal with the backlash of the child. By that I mean is if you tell a child what they do not want to hear and the result of them is throwing a temper tantrum, people just simply do not want to deal with it. I think that is why you see a result of some children being very spoiled and probably do not know how to take no or some sort of rejection in real life. I think that is a similarity for both America and Italy. I have a cousin on my mom's side that has two boys that are rotten down to their feet. She does not believe in disciplining them when they are being disobedient because in her eyes they can never do anything wrong. What ever these boys ask for trust that she will get it for them and she is a phenomenal mother in my opinion. I worry about this because I do not want it to get to a point where it is out of control because kids pick up what they can and cannot get away with.

Today I walked a total of 10,875 steps, yesterday January 15, 2018 I walked a total of 12,093 steps.

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