Our Weekend at Camp: Swimming at Sunset, Palm Leaves for Kindling and #CampHairDontCare

This weekend we camped with girls and young women from across Aruba. As sisters in guiding our camps have a lot in common, but there were some noticeable differences from our camps back home. Here's our top five similarities and top five differences:

5 things that we recognised

1. Spontaneously bursting into song. The weekend was punctuated with musical interludes: energetic renditions of 'Thunderation', morning wake-ups with 'Alice the Camel' and 'Everywhere You Go' in both English and Papiamento. 
2. Roasting marshmallows on the campfire. Smores. Enough Said. 
3. New best friends after 48 hours. We got to know the Aruban leaders and the young women who guide here, but it was also an opportunity for girls from different districts to meet for the first time.
4. Food, Food, Food. We enjoyed the chance to sample some delicious Aruban dishes, but just like at a camp in the UK there was plenty of food and opportunities to tuck in. 
5. Giggles from the girls past midnight. Leaders anywhere in the world share the experience of a first night of camp where you want to get to sleep, but are partly delighted to see the girls having so much fun talking and playing games together late into the evening. 

5 things that were new for us

1. Sunset swims at the beach. This was no cold paddle at Skeggy, as the sun set over the Caribbean Sea we enjoyed the tepid waters at Palm Beach. 
2. New materials for lighting fires. Talking of palms, there was no difficulty lighting a campfire built with dried palm leaves as kindling. In the UK, we'd usually use screwed up balls of newspaper.
3. Iced Tea on tap. Another new one for us as at camp in the UK we're more inclined to drink our tea hot to keep us warm!
4. Flip flops not wellie weather. Walking boots are not required here in Aruba as the chance of rain is minimal. Whereas mud is a consistent feature of UK camps. 
5. Sleeping under the stars. Whilst some of us have bivouacked in the UK before, sleeping on the patio here was preferable to getting into a hot tent and another new experience for us. 

As guides we all have so much in common, but as individuals and with our different cultures there is so much we can learn from each other. This weekend we had so much fun doing just that. 

What makes a good training?

Having spent Thursday acclimatising to the 30 degree heat and getting over our jet lag, Friday was time to get down to work. This weekend we will be running a total of 10 hours of training for existing Aruban leaders, so ahead of our meeting with the Board in the evening we took time during the day to plan out what activities we would include in the sessions.

 

We have been given a steer from last year’s team and the evaluation at the end of their project that leaders want us to cover guiding topics and some generic skills. With two days of training (we think with the same group at each) we split these into a Saturday session about guiding principles and WAGGGS, and followed this with Sunday’s session exploring communication and leadership skills.

It’s important to maintain energy and focus with such a long training session, so there’s many things you need to think about in terms of order and variety of activities. Here’s our top tips for training session planning:

1. Include ice-breakers. Not everyone will know each other before the session, so an ice-breaker is a great way to get people talking.
2. And make sure you introduce yourself as the trainers.
3. Mix it up with an energiser at least every hour or two – especially after a very serious or focused activity. Energisers are active games that encourage you to get up and move, sing, or start talking.
4. Plan more content that you need, but always be prepared that some activities will over run. Timings depend on the group so you need to be flexible in your approach and prepared for whatever may happen.
5. Include breaks. In a five hour training session everyone will need time for loo breaks, to get drinks and snacks or lunch. These might also be a chance for people to informally ask questions that they don’t want to ask in front of the whole group.
6. Be confident. We were selected for GOLD based on our potential to help develop another guiding organisation and have had a chance to practice our training skills during our briefings. Think about how fabulous the training will be and what all the participants will get out of it and avoid any worries about things going wrong. 

Three Things You Need to Know About Our Third Briefing Weekend

From June 9^th – 11^th we reunited in Liverpool for our third (and final face-to-face) briefing weekend. The agenda was packed but full of fun things as well as the serious business. Here’s our top three things you should know about what we got up to. 

•  Team Aruba 2017 Badges Have Arrived…

…and we hope you like the designs. Between us we now have over 1000 badges in total – including a stock for our participants and new friends we’ll meet in Aruba. If you’re in the UK and would like to help us will the final stretch of fundraising, or just love badges (these ones are pretty cute if we do say so ourselves), these are now available to buy for £1 each + P&P. Get in touch with the team member you know the best or drop us a message via our Facebook page and we’ll pop them in the post ASAP. 

• You can never have too many resources for inspiration…

…but we need to only take what we might need with us to Aruba. Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning were spent combing through digital and hard copy versions of resources from WAGGGS, Girlguiding and other youth organisations in order to prepare activity plans for our training sessions with Aruban guides, their leaders and women from the community. We’ve made great headway with over 50 different activities selected so far and will continue to work on this in pairs over the next six weeks before our next catch up over skype.

• GOLD Team Aruba is a TEAM (probably the best team).

On Saturday night we headed out into Liverpool to take on the challenge of Tick Tock Unlock – an escape rooms activity. Together we were locked in a room full of puzzles and deciphered the clues in (what we were told is) an impressive 51 minutes to achieve our freedom and the chance to don fancy dress (as has become our Saturday night custom). We then headed over to Turtle Bay for some celebratory Caribbean food and a taste of some of the flavours we might find during our project. I unfortunately cannot share with you the video of our very impressive dance moves, but safe to say it was another great bonding experience for our team.

Writing this on the train back to Hull as the weekend comes to a close, I think it’s safe to say that we are now more than a team assembled to participate in this project – we are a group of friends who are ready to seize opportunities and face challenges together to share the value of Guiding and Scouting with more girls and women around the world.

Stay tuned as our adventure begins…

Pippa

Second Briefing: Top Seven Things We Learnt

Pippa here, sharing an update after our second team briefing weekend (though with lots of input from my fellow team members). During the weekend we did some role-specific training and I heard about the blog which our team leader Helen contributed to during her trip to Cambodia last year (you can read it here). Taking inspiration from some of their formats, here's a 'Top Seven Things We Learnt at Second Briefing".

1. We can run a successful training activity together. 

First thing on Saturday morning we ran a training activity on Girlguiding's programme renewal for three other GOLD project teams. And it went really well. We thought about the feedback we received and will use this in the next trainings we run.

2. Glue guns and safety pins are excellent tools for fancy dress assembly. 

Our team leader, Helen, came prepared with all the tools we needed to assemble our costumes for the Best of British themed evening entertainments. We had the 'Adult Literature' category and a guest appearances from Gandalf the Grey, Arthur Dent, Lord of the Flies, 39 Steps, Frankenstein and Guiding Magazine.

3. WAGGGS have some pretty useful resources. 

WAGGGS stands for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. Three representatives from their programme department ran a session for us and introduced us to resources we could use on our project. Have you heard about the Climate Change Challenge Badge or Prepared to Learn, Prepared to Lead?

4. And cute mascots can make any subject engaging.

During one of the activities in the WAGGGS session we were tasked with summarising Fit for Work, Fit for Life. We liked how it helped young women work out what skills they had and what they needed for their career, but also the cute mascots for each module. So much so that we have created our own to use in Aruba!

5. Mental Health is as important as physical health. 

On Sunday we had the opportunity to choose which of 3 training sessions we attended. Three of Team Aruba attended a training session on mental health. After learning about what mental health is and the importance of mental wellbeing before, during and after project we came up with a plan of how we can look after ourselves and each other on project. Our favourites were beach yoga, 30 second dance party and "trash and treasure".

6. It was the last time all the 2017 GOLD Teams would be together.

Second briefing was the last time where all the GOLD participants for 2017 will be in the same place at the same time! The next time some of us will meet is at debrief as our third and fourth briefings are just our teams. Team Aruba will be at second debrief in November (with teams going to Ghana, Estonia and Rwanda).

7. We have lots of reading to do!

At the weekend we were introduced to so many wonderful resources by Girlguiding UK, as well as WAGGGS. We're going to be using these as some inspiration for delivering our own training on Aruba. Following Saturday night's quiz on adult literature created by Bridget it would seem most of us need to get reading up on our British literature too!

Until next time.

GOLD Team Aruba