On Friday I finally ended my 12th day of non-stop working and boy was I glad.
Last weekend was sheer madness with us organising a trip to North Wales with 18 young people. We picked them up from their towns all over Wales and the journey on the bus took nine hours.
We had young people aged 14-22 of different backgrounds and abilities, coming together to work on a youth information and advice website. It was something like mixing some ITE kids with others from JC, polys and secondary schools.
There was some good discussion going on and real enthusiasm shown when we were doing the workshops, but we saw the “ITE” equivalent of participants getting bored, disengaged and wandering off.
To get any information out of them required such a big effort and all they cared about was running off for cigarettes or how to sneak out to get alcohol. They ran off to town one night and we had to drive out to hunt them down. There was also a group of girls who moaned incessantly about everything, there was a boy who wouldn’t eat and there were squabbles which we had to resolve.
To make things worse, there were even problems with staff. There were some support staff members who were unclear about their roles and in their haste to help, appeared arrogant or even to be stepping over us. And then one of our drivers got the rented car damaged in a minor accident and that sparked off another series of issues.
When I came home all I wanted to do was to finish my bottle of Baileys in record speed, but I fell asleep instead after dinner. I’m just so glad to be able to enjoy this weekend in peace. Even though I was kept busy with errands, at least it’s only my own things I need to worry about.
