Ok so I've been neglecting you all quite a bit recently. Sorry about that...
Quite a lot has happened to me since we last spoke so I think I'll post 3 different blogs talking about each. The first I should cover is my training week! There will be lots of photos.
SO!
On Tuesday 26th June I travelled back up to Coll (an island off the side of Scotland) for my training course where I would meet the group of people going to China with me. For a few months before training, I met one of the people going with me and we planned to meet up on the train so we had someone to spend our 9 hour (NINE HOURS!!!!) train journey with! We then met up with someone else, then someone else and by the last leg of our trip there was 10 of us on the train to Oban.
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| Me looking so excited on the train... |
Once arriving in Oban at 9:30pm(ish) we took a walk to the hostel where everyone Project Trust related stays! I knew there was going to be a fair few of us (there's usually about 24-26 people in the China group... by FAR the biggest group project send out! For example, the Senegal group was in our training course too and there was only 8 of them!) but when we walked into the main room, the vast amount of us suddenly hit me. Suddenly we were looking at 20 strangers and they were all looking back... you see in a normal every day situation where that may happen, you'd feel awkward and wouldn't really know what to do, BUT straight away we just made best friends with everyone.
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| Some of the people when we walked in... |
One of the best moments in that evening was when we walked in and got our bags and rooms sorted.... I walked over to this strangely tall lad (called Jamie, soon to be one of my best buddies) and asked where in China he's going to which he replied 'Xinjaing' and I said something along the lines of 'ME TOO!' and then looked over to Jony (someone who I had spoken to quite a bit before training, also really rather tall) and shouted 'JONY HE'S GOING TO XINJIANG!' at which point they both ran to each other and shouted 'FUKANG?!' 'FUKANG!!!' (the name of their city) and embraced each other tightly for a fair few minutes... For those of you that don't understand, that was the point when they found out that they were partners - that they would be living and working together for the year. It is such an exciting moment but those two probably won on excitement level!
Anyway. For the rest of the evening everyone drunk alcohol and got to know each other and almost everyone found out who they were partners with! It's very common to have 2 people living together in PT partnerships (like Jamie and Jony) and I was talking to people to find out who I was with. I then talked to a girl called Tessa and I found out I was with her, but THEN she said that this other girl, Georgina, was also with us. So we're a three! We're the only three in the China group so it's different to the norm but I think it's better in a way as there will always be someone there for you. Also in the days to come we found out that we all get on very well so I am now really excited to be spending a year with them!
Anyway at about 2 or 2:30am people started to head off to bed knowing that 2 hours later we would need to wake up for the ferry leaving early in the morning......
The following day was long. Getting up at 4 in the morning is hard work... especially after just 2 hours sleep! We left for a 5 hour ferry ride to arrive in Coll at about 10:30. As soon as we arrived it was straight onto hard work! Project Staff were at the ferry terminal and welcome us and drive us the the Hebredean Centre - it felt so good to be back! We were taken to the main room (the rank room) and were told who we were partnered with (even though we all found out in the previous night) and where our rooms were. In the selection week we stayed with families scattered across the island, but this time we were staying in the bedrooms in the centre. This was good because everyone was together so we could bond in the evenings!
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| A wall of the Rank Room all decorated with China things! |
So in this first day we met our desk officer (the desk officer is the staff member in charge of your country group.. so in our case we have a guy called Jonny who is lovely!) and had a chat with him about China... we talked about boring things like insurance and sponsorship/fundraising so far and talked to each other and found out about the other people in our group. During that, me and Tessa plaited Jony's hair. He looked really rather dashing.
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| Jony looking oh so happy with his new hair style |
That evening everyone had a choice to either play football against the Coll football team (I was surprised there was even enough people on the island to make a football team..) or to walk along the beach to look for seals. I obviously went for the seals.
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| If you look closely, you can see a seal! |
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| Me and a couple of my favourite guys.. (Jony and Jamie) |
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| We're the ones in the blue! |
The day after, the Thursday, we learnt how to be a good teacher when teaching a language people completely don't understand. We got an idea of this from the student perspective as Nick (one of the PT staff) walked into the room and got us learning words and phrases in Sinhalese (the main language in Sri Lanka). But the most interesting and exciting bit was he didn't say anything in English at all. He didn't even brief us on what was about to happen, he just walked in and straight away got us saying 'ayubowan' to each other (hello) and then how to ask 'how are you?' and various responses etc... In just an hour we learnt 'hello', 'how are you?', 'I am good', 'I am not good', 'what is your name?', 'my name is...', 'where do you live?' and 'I live in....'. So that hour taught us that you can teach a completely foreign language without needing to know any of the language of the people you are teaching to.... which is a very good thing to know when you're going to China and don't have a great understanding of Mandarin! (yet..)
We had more talks about serious things like culture shock and the rights of the child and things we should know about...
AH!
I HAVEN'T TALKED ABOUT THE FOOD YET! The food was basically the best part of each day. Jane (the cook) is a goddess. For breakfast you get cereal, then toast and jam AND THEN a cooked breakfast as well. Amazing. Then for lunch you get soup with a freshly cooked roll and then a meal meal.. like jacket potato or something... and then for supper you get a meal meal and a pudding! So good. We weeped with happiness at each meal.
Anyway where was I..? Yes! We had boring, serious talks about serious things and then had supper (brilliant) and then had the evening to relax. Well technically we had to plan a 10 minute English lesson for the morning after.... but a lot of us relaxed. Obviously we got the work done too.. but watching Braveheart took priority. However it was terrifying watching it around such strong Scots.....
OH! Another thing you need to know.... there's only a few Scottish people going to China this year.. but they are ALL going to Xinjiang with me! There's only me and this girl from Leeds who are not Scottish and it is terrifying. Most of the Xinjiang population will be learning English with a heavy Scottish accent - which will be rather entertaining...
Anyway back to the film.. I made the mistake of sitting on the sofa full of the Scottish ones and they all got very loud during the fighting scenes... so as to blend in I pretended to be Scottish for the evening and cheered for their side. It was all very fun.
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| The cute couple |
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| The opposition... look at them being all not Scottish and stuff.. ergh. |
The day after we had our 10 minute lessons... This freaked me out quite a bit. It went well but the hardest bit was to spread out things for 10 minutes - so no idea how I'll manage whole hour lessons! I held my lesson on 'what to buy at a supermarket' which was one of the topics on a sheet of options project gave us... I used flashed cards I made the evening before and sounded out words clearly so the 'Chinese students' could understand but it was just generally weird teaching people who could actually already speak English.... so at least that bit will be better when the students genuinely don't understand what you're saying!
Later on in the day we had a talk on health and safety and that's when basically everyone on the course realised how tired we all were...... Basically we all fell asleep during the talk. So Chris (the staff member doing the talk) kept getting us to jump up and dance around and things..... But wow! We were so tired. That's what happens when you get no more than 5 hours a sleep for a week does to you....
That evening a lot of us decided to take a stroll down to the beach and have a swim in the sea! The weather was beautiful - cloudy, windy and rainy. Just beautiful. But that didn't stop us! We were in the sea for 15-30 minutes and bloody hell it was soooo cold. We were shivering non stop but it was just so fun! Getting back out into the windy wind was the worst bit...
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| look at that lovely blue sky........... |
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| Us in frozen hysterics afterwards... (I haven't talked about Hannah yet.. but the girl on the right is Hannah and she is very important. She is a brethren member. I haven't even talked about the brethren yet.. shame on me.) |
We then got back with full intentions of planning our 20 minute lesson for the following morning. We (the brethren - this consists of me, Hannah, Jony and Jamie. We basically formed this on the very first night in Oban... We just bonded. Story over.) locked ourselves in one of the small work rooms but shortly got distracted by a board pen and a whole white board to decorate... also then Alana (a previous volunteer from China who got back last August who is helping project over the summer.. she loved us. She called us her 'china babies'. We love her.) came into the room and we all just talked about life for about 4 hours. By about 1am we looked at our work and had done about half a page of notes. Not cool. I did get some very nice photos in that time though which I think should be shared, so here they are!
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| The brethren with work and alcohol on the table. What a brilliant photo. |
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| Actually doing work! |
The 20 minute lesson on the final day was even harder believe it or not..! It's just hard trying to go through it slowly instead of rushing it.. So we did that which was followed by a well deserved coffee break. The rest of the day was filled with short but sweet talks of what we need to remember while we're out there... like don't have unprotected sex with random Chinese men.. which is good to know I guess! Then at 5, we had our closing address which rounded up the course basically... and theeeeeeen we all got ready for the ceilidh!
Basically the ceilidh is the best bit of the whole week and everyone gets all nice and dressed up.. so it was all very exciting! Once we got ready we made our way into the room with the TV and sofas (the Dulverton room) and many group photos were taken. (here's some of those photos..)
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| The Xinjiang group looking dapper |
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| Me, Dan and Tessa |
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| Me and ma boooys |
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| Everyone going to China! |
The summer staff (the previous volunteers including Alana) had made a rather alcoholic punch too, so lots of that was consumed! After a few toasts given by the staff, we all walked on down to the dining room where a lovely candle lit dinner with wine was waiting for us. Basically it was amazing. We had roast beef with everything and then pavlova for pudding - beautiful. Also after the punch from before and a few glasses of wine each, we were happy. Or 'so sober!' as Alana put it. So as you can imagine, the ceilidh was SO fun! Skipping around and doing really fast Scottish dances while getting increasingly drunk, due to the bar, was so entertaining and everyone had a great night. Here are another few photos of the ceilidh part of the night... sadly though I didn't get any photos of the actual dancing.. as I was too busy being involved in the dancing.
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| Jony being a proper stud |
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| The brethren and Alana - so much love for this photo |
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| me and ma boys again - starting to feel tired after such hardcore ceilidhing |
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| The brethren plus desk officer Jonny in the middle! |
After the ceilidh, we were all very hot and sweaty (nice) so we got changed into normal clothes and started partying away to less Scottish-y dance music. A great way to end the night! So the last few photos are of that section of the evening...
The morning after was sad as we all had to get ready in order to leave.. Everyone put on their newly acquired Project Trust clothes with pride and spent the morning saying bye to the staff... The worst bit was saying bye to Alana as our brethren bunch got very close to her.... But we helped her wash up after breakfast to spread the love!
We were driven back to the ferry terminal and caught the uber long ferry to Oban again.. This time we had a lovely nap though to recover from the previous night!
When we arrived in Oban it began to get pretty sad as we had to say bye to the friends we just met for 7 weeks.. But knowing that in 7 weeks time we would all meet up again in order to spend a year with each other, that cheered us up.
After a night in Glasgow with the group getting smaller and smaller as more and more people left us, me and Dan were left once again as just the two of us on our journey home...
I had such an amazing week and have met such amazing people. I am now so excited to be spending a year with them doing truly exciting things! I will end this blog with a cheesy quote we were told of on the course... 'I went to training to meet the people I'd be spending a year with, and I came back to debriefing with my best friends' - lovely.
After a night in Glasgow with the group getting smaller and smaller as more and more people left us, me and Dan were left once again as just the two of us on our journey home...
