This week, all of the leaders decided that the best topic for this meeting would be about saying ‘no’, as we all felt strongly about the fact that saying the word ‘no’ is not as bad or rude as society makes it nowadays. When we walked into the room, the girls were already in there, having fun and playing with each other. We quickly got them settled down, and made the students pass around sign-up sheets that we had just recently produced in order to keep the students more safe and have their location easily known in case of any emergency. We took turns asking each girl how their day was, and began a little bit of chit-chat or small talk before we, instead of discussing the theme straightaway, went directly to the activity we had planned earlier. We told the girls to go stand over by the wall, and when they asked us why, we told them nothing. But nonetheless, despite their unanswered questions and endless curiosity, they did it anyway. We asked them why they just went over to the wall when they had no prior intention before we told them to, with no good reason, and they couldn’t come up with an answer. We let them sit back down in their seats, and then we introduced the theme for this week. It came to no surprise to us that each student, when we asked them, believed that saying ‘no’ in response to anything was rude. And while that may be true in certain situations, such as speaking to your elders, we told them that anything that they didn’t want to do, they didn’t have to do. If doing so made her unhappy or anxious, there is no justifiable reason that she should ‘willingly’ go through with it. After discussing the topic for over 40 minutes, we moved on to the volunteering project that the leaders are currently working on making available for the kids. Last week we had narrowed it down from a variety of volunteering options to what the students were most interested in: animal shelters. We brainstormed numerous items that we believed an animal shelter might need, and we added it to the list, making plans to call an animal shelter that had less donations but needed more. An hour flew by quickly, and before we knew it, we were saying goodbye to the kids, telling that we would see them next week with more fun and games- Ashley 2/28/17