Entry 7: Whirlpool of thoughts.

My mind is racing, my thoughts are all over the place and I think I'm getting a cold....

I have only recently come back from volunteering for spending a week with 60 children at a camp, which was rather exhausting...both mentally and physically. It has left me with memories, experience, and a lot of thoughts to stew in the cooking pot of my brain. The problem is that when going from a week filled with few breaks and lots to do, to nothing to do and lots of breaks means that the effects of the past week catch up all in one go and it frankly hit me rather badly. But the solution has only come within minutes of writing this blog, the solution was brewed with hot water, placed into a cup, added milk for flavour and then served. If you have already guessed the answer was Tea. Funnily enough the effects of the magical brew is starting to take effect, I'm feeling all better. So now with that problem fixed, lets explain my week...I have come to the conclusion that when working with children is that you have balance a couple of things. One is that you feel like a child yourself, for example put yourself in their shoes, think how they would think, act like they would act, and the second is to be responsible; when working with children you have to know that you are their for their safety and have to take charge if any trouble arises or could arise. This is part of the experience that I have learned when working with children. The memories is the laughter and fun that I have enjoyed, because after all if your not having fun while their having fun then what's the point? and finally the thoughts, one of them mainly being that sometimes the work and things that happen don't go unnoticed. Inside the the team room was a whiteboard, which read "Board of encouragement" with all the teams names on A4 envelopes with some felt tips and pieces of small paper for little notes to be written and placed into peoples specific envelope, just reading the messages that people had posted felt rather warming. Some of the messages read how nice it was watching me grow as a leader, others was your doing well, keep up the good work and even through the week, people came up to me and asked how I was, how I was doing well, and in the end we was able to keep the messages for ourselves to keep.

But one of my highlight has to be one of the children in my group, that coming to the end of the week that felt rather homesick, grabbed my attention and said "you know, I'm really going to miss this". It really hit me hard how this week it may have been mentally and physically tiring but looking back and seeing that some of those kids are going to go back to their lives with the memory of that fantastic week, some of them changed by the experiences of the week.

In deep thought

J Machan