Volunteering with JTS - week 4

I can’t believe I only have one week left here! This past week has been great fun.

Friday night was Burns night. I had a black pudding and apple home made sausage role for lunch, mushroom and haggis for dinner and had my first try of IRN BRU! It was all delicious – no small part due to Tracy’s great cooking I’m sure! IRN BRU was interesting. It tasted like a vibrantly orange version of Kirks Creaming Soda. Scotland and South Australia are actually the only two regions in the world where Coca Cola products have been introduced and are not the most popular drink. (South Australia because of Farmers’ Union Ice Coffee, and Scotland because of IRN BRU.)

Saturday was Australia day. I think it was my first Australia day not in Australia because school's back by now. We all went to Edinburgh to do an open-top bus tour. It was interesting to learn about the history of Edinburgh. All of the building in the old town were built before Europeans had discovered Australia. There was such a clashing of architecture from different time periods all woven together. My favourite was definitely the Scott monument with its Gothic spires. We climbed Arthurs seat giving us an uninterrupted view the whole way across Edinburgh and down to the Forth Bridges. We went the National Museum of Scotland and saw a Celtic music performance and a great exhibition on design and technology. Then it was off to the museum of childhood. I was amused to see the exact same model of Gameboy that had been passed down to me (from my brother, who got it from mum), in one of the exhibits on what growing up in the 70s was like. That evening we saw a very rowdy group of Australians wearing the flag on their heads! We had a great dinner at a tapas place and headed home.

On Sunday, Ian (my godfather) and I did some Mountain Biking. We headed to Cathkin Braes Mountain Bike Park and had a great morning on the trails. This park was were they did all the mountain biking during the Commonwealth Games. It had a number of great trails winding up and down the hill with a skills park at the bottom. I was borrowing Ian’s bike (an XL frame), so it was almost ridiculously large on me. With the seat the whole way down, I could just reach the ground, but the handlebars were miles in front of me and I had to basically ‘superman’ to reach them. On the other hand, the best part about riding his bike is the wheels could roll over anything; tree roots and rocks were no longer obstacles. That evening, Tracy, Ian and I went to see Fisherman’s Friends singing at the old fruit market in Glasgow. This was part of a music festival known as ‘Celtic Connections’, although this particular group were all from Cornwall singing Sea Shanties. I knew a total of one of their songs (What do you do with a drunken sailor?), but it was great fun. They all sang really well, and it was upbeat, fun music; a very enjoyable evening.

On Monday, I was looking at our marketing budget for 2018 and digging through our numerous invoice folders to compare with our actual expenditure - it was like a scavenger hunt. I took over the meeting room upstairs so I could spread out and also have adequate heating because the warehouse below was properly cold.

That night I was talking at another Brownie meeting and Tracy met one of the parent helpers who also happened to be the deputy head of a nearby school. She jumped at the chance to have me speaking at an assembly about my experiences with Fair Trade and JTS. The leader of the Brownie pack is also a university lecturer. She is currently running a course for fist year engineering students about engineers without borders. She asked me to give them a lecture on Monday about things you have to take into consideration when doing projects in different countries. How the difference in society and culture, climate and physical landscape can make the best laid plans go astray. (You’ll have to tune into my next blog to see if that went well!)

I went to a cub meeting and learnt how to do Ceilidh dancing (although most of the boys were at the ‘ewww hold hands with a girl!’ sort of age.) - my first draft of the blog had it spelt Kaylee... I also got to go to the Scottish Parliament for a meeting about our upcoming reception. It looks like it was designed for a different climate with the canopy out the front made of wooden slats (not exactly water proof!). But still a rather impressive building.

On Friday, I was on my way to the school assembly, only to find that my train had been cancelled. I had to scramble to catch a series of buses to get there on time (then spent 15 minutes or so waiting at the school before I was needed meaning I could have caught the next train instead….) I think in total my talk went quite well. I got to put the case studies of Malawian farmer families I had compiled to good use. The p4-7s seemed to really engage with the talk, it is a rather poignant age for them because they’re getting ready to transition to secondary school. 2 out of 3 Malawian children don’t have that opportunity. On Friday night I headed to a guide group. They had some of the older guides running an activity about Chinese New Year (which is on the 5th Feb this year), and each patrol had also organised their own activity in accordance with a badge. I was overseeing two groups who were cooking chocolate pastries, only they had misread the recipe and they were actually making the dough for pasties ! I was a little dubious how the savory dough would go with the chocolate, but they ended up enjoying it all the same (they were sharing two blocks of chocolate between the 5 of them, so I shouldn’t have been surprised they enjoyed it just due to the sheer amount of melted chocolate in it!) Another group was doing an indescribable experiment involved red cabbage, slime and the terrible stink of over boiled cabbage – they were thankfully in a different room.

It has been a great week and I am sad that my time here is coming to a close. I will see you all next week for my last!?! blog. Have a good weekend.