English for Activists

Dear All,

Hello. I hope you are well there.
I'm sorry to delay delivering E-news letter.

We had a class on Apr. 6th 2010, we did four activities.

1) Correction
We corrected Seika's E-newsletter which delivered last week.
It was almost perfect, but there are some uncommon phrases for native speakers,
we interchanged some words common expression.

2 )Discussion about the new meeting room
We have to find the new meeting room, which is used, from May 11th,
we discussed about it.
Some people propose some places.
For example, "Yotsuya Hiroba", "YWCA", "Cafe Renoir",

Hi, everyone. This is an e-news letter for the last class on 30th March. I will briefly describe the activities in the class and make small notes of what appeared remarkable to me.

We did three things in the class.

Firstly, we did the correction of the last e-news letter written by Yasu-san. There, Yasu-san detailed the process of Monopoly we played in the class. I thought it amazing that he could represent the process so meticulously, none of which I could recall (perhaps I did not know what was going on, even when I was playing!).

A report discussed on Democracy Now! on March 12, 2010 has this shocking statistic: "nearly half of all single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth, meaning their debts exceed all of their assets. The median wealth for single black women is only $100; for single Hispanic women, $120. This compares to just over $41,000 for single white women."

From Yasu-san:

Good evening everybody ! I try to write my home work.

Learning Plan of 3/23
Practice making the sounds and rhythms of English -- It had not done.
Talking about some topics and news -- May be it had not done, too.
Play monopoly -- So good!
Write a short report for the EFA e-newsletter -- Too severe for me, but is fun for me.

Go to dinner and drink -- It warmed up. We wanted to talk each other, but we must roll dice in class, so at tha restaulant we talked and talked, I think.

Hi everyone,
Here is the report of the EFA class on March 13th.

1) Memorizing the members' names
12 people got together including new members. So at first, we repeated each
member's name one by one, and memorized them.

2) Chanting in English.
"Education under attack" "What do you do?" "Stand up! Fight back!"
The key point was to shorten between "do?" and "Stand", like "What do you
dostand up! Fight back"

3) Know each other
In order to know each member's interest and to find out who have the similar
interest of his own, we exchanged own ideas with each other.

　510日間に及んだ韓国の女性非正規労働者たちの闘いを描いたドキュメンタリー作品『Weabak：外泊』を上映します。まだ観ていない人は、この機会をお見逃しなく！　上映後には、韓国労働運動とジェンダーの視点からお二人のトークを予定しています。

日時：2010年3月25日（木曜日）午後6時30分～9時
場　所：明治大学駿河台キャンパス研究棟2階第9会議室
参加費：無料

EFA courses in Tokyo and Yokohama start this week. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone and meeting new people. I haven't updated the website recently but I will soon add more items. I hope people feel free to come back and blog here -- great reading and writing practice!

Takasu, Joe, Keiichi and Yasuko worked on this text from Shige's report:

Object

The object of this forum is to contribute to build north east asia green community through making sustainable living area. The first forum ware started at 2001 and continued every year changing the holding place.

Subject
Turn around the past years, the subject were changed every year. Takesima in Korea named Dokuto domain problem, Japanese Textbook of History, Nuclear armament of North Korea, Worship Yasukuni Shrine problem, Decentralization.

This the the text before corrections by Daisuke, Rie and Shige:

Hakenmura (Toshikoshi hakenmura, "Tent City") was a camp at Hibiya Park, from Dec. 31 2008 to Jan. 5 2009. About 500 people, various ages, from various cities, came to stay there for wormth and foods and beds. Because they lost their job, home, and entire fortune. But they couldn't depend on anyone. Almost of them were temporary workers. They were trembling from cold and hunger.

After corrections:

In class we worked on texts written by participants. One group worked on Sumiko Takaki's report back from the CEDAW meeting in New York.

This is the text before corrections by Keiko, Sumiko and Rutsuko:

1. On the '70th, Women Liberation movement was very aggressive all over the world. In those background, United Nation adopted 'Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women' on 1979.
Japanese Government ratified the treaty on 1985 by pushing Women movement.