Colasiste Fierste School
Since the GX team decided to make marching in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade our community event, we wanted to involve local youth as much as possible. On Monday, Toni Vaughan arranged for us to go to Colasiste Fierste School, one of the Catholic schools that her organization Barnardo’s serves. The students are ages 11-18 and are taught entirely in the Irish language. We set up different workshops, with the help of The Beat Initiative. Andres and Siya taught Poetry, there was drumming and also instrument making. I helped out with this one. We had groups of youth in one-hour sessions with a tea/cookies break in between, as well as a delicious lunch in the cafeteria (where the kids plied us with questions about our countries).
Here is a photo of the shakers that we made out of plastic plumbers pipes, with metal rods, colorful tape and bottle caps.
These were small drums that we helped the kids to make. They had to tighten bolts and screws around the rim which was challenging.
We had to abort the last workshops because one (or more) of the kids kept setting off the fire alarms and forcing everyone to evacuate the building. Apparently they didn’t want to take their exams. The administrators gathered all of the students into the gymnasium for a stern lecture. It was all spoken in Irish, so we couldn’t understand what they were saying, but we got the drift.
