Week Seven - Maria and Charlie

This week was a busy week we went to Edinburgh, to our Volunteer Placement, and we had a team day in which we went bowling.
So the week started off by going to Edinburgh early on Monday morning, almost everyone fell asleep on the bus on the way, probably because we were all at a gig the previous night. We arrived in Edinburgh and went to the Scottish Parliament for a tour; unfortunately buttons didn’t show us around this time. After we had been shown around the amazing building which we were informed cost £414million.We went to the British Council for lunch. And after the British Council we were free to roam the city in which we saw the castle, a few of us walked up the big hill, walked along the Royal Mile, went to the childhood museum and a few of us even ate our first battered Mars bar.
On Tuesday we went to our Volunteer Placement at Aberdeen Foyer on a project called Community Signature. The idea behind it is that it is a type of questionnaire that is interactive and gets in depth responses from the people we are asking the questions to. The community we are working with is Torry, the aim of doing the Signatures is that we can send the gathered information to the Council who can then find the areas that need investment. We were at a retirement home on Tuesday asking five pensioners what they thought about their community.
On Wednesday it was Charlie and Lillian’s GCD which was on Human Rights.
On Thursday we again went to our volunteer placement where we did a signature with two men who are on initiatives run by Aberdeen Foyer.
On Friday there was a team day in which the group discussed several issues and ways to solve those issues. We decided that we would like to see what each other would be doing in their placements rather than always discussing problems as the team is starting to integrate and communicate very well. We also had a session run by Dave looking at stereotypes and how that can affect peoples attitudes to one another. Later on in the evening we went bowling where we all could relax after having such a busy week.