Last Week of Global Xchange
For those of us who didn’t have to be at our WAP on Monday night, we gathered in Belfast Centre and went to Nando’s for dinner at Victoria Square. Nando’s is a popular fast-food type of chain that serves chicken in South Africa, so it was very welcomed by those GX members from Durban who were from there. The Belfast restaurant was warm and attractive. I enjoyed hanging out with everyone and eating good food.
The GX team spent our last two days together at the British Council so that we could review our experiences in Belfast, and plan for the third Youth Phase. The members from Sierra Leone and Rwanda had to leave on Friday. The rest of us were scheduled to return home on Sunday.
We spent Thursday experiencing Jessica’s wonderful presentation about her agency Leo Lagrange Ile de France in Paris. She gave us a great “thermometer” tool to use, which sparked an interesting discussion.
Global Xchange Program Supervisor Neil Williams flew in from London to hear our assessment and was joined by Brian Wilson of the British Council in Belfast. We shared our overall impressions of GX, with the focus on Belfast.
Before we left the British Council, we were all given the name of a team member and were told to come up with a short speech about that individual, which we presented at a farewell dinner that GX gave us that night at Rhubarb restaurant. The name I was given was Pumizile Yika from South Africa.
Most of the speeches were presented as a guessing game, where a description of the person was given, along with what they meant on a personal level to the individual giving the speech, and then we had to figure out who it was. I was upfront about Pumzile being my target since I wanted her to know right away how much I enjoyed meeting her.
When Richard Buthelezi from Durban gave his speech about me, I didn’t know until he was almost done that it was about me. I wish I had tape recorded it, although I do remember most of the beautiful things that he said, which I’ll always treasure.
It was very emotional as we had to say final goodbyes to our teammates from Sierra Leone and Rwanda.
On Friday morning, we went over the youth program. Breaking up into groups, we gave our suggestions of how long they should stay, whether or not youth should live in host homes and other situations that are important, like transportation and work placements. The Global Xchange supervisors will now incorporate some of our ideas into their existing model and later this year, we will select youth from our organizations to spend extended time in Durban and Belfast.
On Friday night, a bunch of us went to the Odyssey Arena, a huge sports and entertainment complex in Belfast.
There was Toni, Mary, Jessica, Chickey, Sbonello, Menzi, and Kelly met us, too.
We went to see “Alice in Wonderland in 3D,” which was especially fun since some of the group had never seen 3-D movies before, nor heard the story of “Alice in Wonderland.” This led to some fascinating discussions later.
