Hi! My name is Valeriya, I’m fifteen years old, and this is my second year being apart of the Social Responsibility/PA-MOJA program! I go to Charles Best Secondary School, where I am a sophomore, or in other words, I’m in grade 10, and I live in Coquitlam, near the Charles Best area. At school, I’m really interested in the humanities and social sciences, I love Social Studies and English– all languages for that matter, I’m actually taking both French and Spanish too! On the contrary, my least favourite subject is math, but really only because it doesn’t come naturally to me.
My entire family is from Ukraine, and most of my relatives still live there. Both of my parents grew up and lived in Brovary, a city in the Kyiv Oblast. I only lived there for the first year of my life before my family immigrated to Canada. There are a lot of cultural aspects I love about Ukraine, but one of my favourites is the fact that we have a ton of superstitions. My family and I, we aren’t superstitious at all, but we still bring them up at times and joke around. For example, if you sit at the very corner of a table, you’ll never get married. Or, if you whistle indoors, you’ll whistle all your financial fortune away. It’s a little silly, but it’s fun to bring up when someone does something like that at our house.
I am the most overwhelmingly indecisive person ever when it comes down to my passions, because I feel as though there are just too many things I love deeply. This kind of care and love of things and people leaves me completely tongue-tied when it comes down to the infamous question of, “what is your passion?” So, while there are many, some of my passions are writing and reading; I love to write stories and school papers, and I equally love reading books and journals. I’m also passionate about things like law and justice. I love, and hate, to read about global issues, challenges and strengths of different countries, all the different societal and governmental structures.
(Matilda is one of my favourite childhood movies, and books!)
I love sport! Particularly, I love to swim, and this is mostly what takes up my free time. I swim competitively with a swim club and even with my school. I love swimming so much because I have genuinely learned so many important lessons from it and I have met so many amazing people through it as well. Sport is something so, so special to me and I’ve found my love of sport in other places too, like, yoga, tennis, and strength training.
Furthermore, a question that really interested me was: “If you could solve any local or global problem what would it be? And why?” I think this is a really profound and insightful question, and there’s a lot to unpack. There’s obviously so many issues and difficulties both locally and globally that it’s difficult to even begin to think of one thing to improve. Last year, when I answered this question, I said I would want to improve mental health and the access to mental health support. I think that this year, after seeing so many media headlines, a huge issue I would want to solve is the global oppression and violence. By this I mainly refer to things like the war in Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iranian military conflicts. All these events have extremely heavy political, societal, and controversial weight to them, but my goal isn’t to choose a side or give an opinion on politics. I believe in the people that must exist and survive during times of war and political cruelty. And the thing I would like to solve is the loss and pain that many people experience due to insanely brutal and inhumane situations, due to genocide, and starvation, and the lack of many other basic human needs being met.
For my first project this year, I am most interested in doing an inquiry project. I don’t have an exact question in mind yet, but I hope to soon think of something meaningful that I can research and share with others.
Thank you for reading my post!
