Residential

Hi, today we will tell how we were arranging our first residential for girls, which basically means going away for a weekend together with a group of young people. There’s loads to think about beforehand and to organise - we called residential centres, organized transport and activities, wrote parent’s letters and filled in loads and loads of forms about orders, quotations and invoices… we are experts now!

But even the best planned residential can give you some surprises and the chances of parents consent forms getting lost increase with departure time getting closer, that’s scientifically proven!

But in the end we were all sitting in the bus on our way to Newcastle, looking forward to a nice weekend. And it was really successful! We wanted the girls to think about a story matching the project name: Away from Violence, Breaking the Cycle. Beforehand they’ve already decided to make a film about their story and they managed to create a storyboard plus the whole film within 4 hours!

It was great to see how much fun they had and how they were really getting into their roles. As soon as it’s edited you can watch it online, of course.

After this successful day they’ve had some free time to play football and meet other groups who were staying at the residential centre but we were also making some nice pancakes with Nutella and everything.

We managed to get at least a few hours of sleep before we started the next day with going to the town where everyone had some free time. While the girls were exploring the shops and amusements Newcastle has to offer, we tried “Mauds” ice-cream for the first time (really nice!) and found a lot of shells on the beach, furthermore the weather was wonderful throughout the whole weekend!

Back at the residential centre there were two climbing activities planned for us. It was good fun even though Irina and me are both a bit afraid of heights and only tried one of them. But our group was so brave, we were really impressed!

After all those activities and the short night everyone was sleeping in the bus back to Belfast but it seemed as if they’ve really enjoyed it and everything worked out well, that’s the best reward!