I will be writing roughly from what I have rewrote on my
notebook to then be able to go back and help inform other YMCA users what is
happening here. On the first day it was very nerve racking in the car journey
up here but as soon as I walked through the door clutching my bag I instantly
felt accepted as I was one of the last people to show up. The first thing we
did was an ice breaker called human bingo where we get a sheet of paper with
loads of boxes full of different things about each other like who has two pets,
who has an allergy and then by speaking to people we were able to find out
things about them once we had found the box for the person we put their name in
the correct box the first person to get a line up or down they call bingo after
that we were given our time tables and lanyards and after that people where so
tired then went to sleep, jet lag I guess.
On the first day we had a nice early start at 8 in the
morning where we walked over got breakfast of a full English breakfast followed
by a nice message of the day from Adi who showed us a video of a guy who was in
the Olympics who pulled a hamstring in the race and his dad came running down
and carried him round the track with a standing ovation of 60,000 people and at
the last 10 meters let him hop across the line. The message was when to help
people and when to let them help themselves and let them try on their own very
touching way to start the week and the day then we continued with a lot more
ice breakers just to get each other familiar with everyone as some people had
people they come with and other had never met anyone. For the end of the day we
done a nice I believe session where we talked about our own perspective on certain
situation like drugs or alcohol and a lot more we did these separately and didn’t
share unless we wanted to which I found to be a very eye opening as it helped
me see what my own opinions on certain things are very good.
On the second day we started once again at a nice 8 o clock
start followed by a England group message of the day; basically all of the
people from England where asked to make a message of the day to help get
everyone focused on the same thing. We used a video of a guy who had no arms
and no legs but was not letting that stop him from completing all the things he
wanted to do from kayaking to waterslides even powerboating afterward we
followed it up with some messages from team England like stay strong don’t give
up and a few other messages. We were then shown a history PowerPoint of youth
work about how it had developed and how far it has come from being all male
based youth work to being mixed race, gender and a lot more of changes that are
still in use today. We also watched the film ‘Freedom Writers’ which was used to show how far a person would
go to help people who are a lot different to herself and how she risked
everything she had just to help them. Very motivational to help other people
who maybe are not in your situation but that doesn’t mean you can’t help them.
At the end of the day we done a team building exercise of orienteering where we
had markers placed all over the 120 acer area of Fairthorne which was very fun
and very tearing and took about 2 hours the winners got shirts from the YMCA
(very jealous)
This has been my blog I hope you all have a very good day
and had fun reading about all the amazing things that the YMCA are doing to
help young people thank you and goodbye
Louis Cozens
Tenant representative of YMCA Southampton
Louis, this is fantastic. I have been travelling in Canada all last week and the staff who were with me were also posting to the blog. I understand that you might be the youngest member of the group and I can tell you your post is up there and as good if not better than the other posts written by senior staff from across England. The blog has thousands of readers from all over the world, since you posted your post it has been read by people in Canada, UK, USA, Ireland, Ukraine, China and Vietnam. Thank you for leading the way on posts from the event you are participating in. It would be great if you could post a further one later in the week.
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