Today, it is our honor to introduce NTS’ teen blogger, Natali Chinchaladze. Natali discovered NTS through the website VolunteerMatch. We have worked together for nearly a year and her work is remarkable by any standards – most particularly for someone so young, who speaks English as a second language. Rather than tell you about her, it is our pleasure for you to meet Natali in her own words:
It is a pleasure to meet the NTS school community. I am 15 years old and from Kutaisi, Georgia – the Republic of Georgia not the US. I am in the 11th grade and study at Niko Nikoladze School.
School is my great love. There are millions of things I like and admire about my school. Even walking in the gate makes me cheerful and instantly lifts my mood. My priority is to study and I am different this way from many teens my age. I am lucky to be in a school where the teachers make the school environment welcoming and open, they respect my love for learning, and I feel I can truly be and grow into my best self. I am specifically so grateful to my mathematics teacher, who has taught me since 7th grade. He was the first math teacher who made me look at the subject differently, and through his help, I became quite interested and fully committed to the subject. He is the portrait of the ideal teacher, who puts in a lot of extra hours to make our education really count.
Academic achievement is the fuel that keeps me going and motivated. I know that education is the key to a better, brighter future. I know that all of this hard work won’t go to waste and may lead me to my dream university. But these characteristics of mine—dedication, aim for results, seriousness of purpose — do separate me from other teens. So, when friendships are hard to make, I turn to books which take me to worlds where I am independent and free and where there are a million possibilities.
And while I disappear into others’ tales, I know I am building my own. In addition to school, I love volunteer activities. I have taught children the English language online in India and, am proud to be NTS’ teen blogger. I love writing about diverse topics that concern millions of people. And this experience has taught me a lot about the world and its many challenges. It has helped me to realize what “work” means.
In life, I adore every hardworking person who has put, as poets would say, “blood and sweat” into becoming their present self. And kindness, I think, is one of the greatest things to appreciate in life. It is beautiful to see even the smallest gestures of kindness.
And since NTS is about helping teens build futures, let me tell you about my hopes for my future career. I want to be a political scientist where I will have the chance to change people’s lives for the better and debate things of international value. Challenging these great problems makes me stronger, and I always remember John Kennedy’s speech at Rice University where he said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.