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Friday Aug 04, 2006

Training for a year... In a week

I've just been on my training course back up on the Isle of Coll.  At first I was a little sceptical that a week's preparation would help me that much, but it was absolutely great! In all honesty, I don't feel that I know exactly how to run a newspaper, teach in a primary school and whatever else I'll end up doing, but I at least feel more confident that I'll be able to learn once I get to Namibia. 

We had teaching practice, which I actually quite enjoyed even though it was odd doing primary school lessons for a group of 18 year olds. Then for journalism practice we were dropped off in the village for half an hour and told to gather enough stories for a 2 page newspaper, then we had to learn how to use the program to publish the paper - it was a mad rush but we did it, and were probably more proud than we should have been for such a short edition! There were four of us doing journalism, two Namibia volunteers and two Cambodia volunteers. So, logically, we declared ourselves an independent republic - the smallest in the world - and called the paper The Nambodian News, then giggled for a very long time. Ok, we hadn't been sleeping much...

I met my partner who I'll be living with next year, and she's lovely - I'm so relieved! I was going through horror scenarios in my head where I was paired with some kind of unwashed psychotic inbred, but luckily Project Trust didn't seem to have many of those going. My partner's called Bozena (pronounced Bo-jay-na, with a soft j sound); meeting each other and starting preparations for leaving next month (next month! Eek!) made us both more excited for the year than we'd ever been before.

The moment when it hit me and the other volunteers on the course that we were REALLY going was when they handed out the plane tickets. Obviously we'd all been thinking about it a lot, but still everyone had their own little stunned silence as we looked at the tickets that would take us 5,500 miles away. As it's a return ticket, I was actually holding 11,000 miles in my hands - how often do you get to do that?

I'm actually already excited to see everyone from my training course on Debriefing after our year away, it was such a fun group to be in.  There were volunteers for Japan, Namibia, Honduras, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Guatemala, so it'll be fun to hear about all the hugely different experiences everyone's had, and probably go on about my own at great length!

Anyway, I got a bit carried away and I've written too much. So I'll go now.

Posted by Lucy Hayes ( 3:19 PM )
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