Third Briefing- Wow that is a long "to-do" list

This weekend was our third (and final) briefing weekend for Guyana. We met up on Friday night in London at Clare's boyfriends parents house (I know- complicated, but it was amazing- a big thank you from Team GOLD Guyana 2013 to Adrian and your parents).

After long journeys for some of the team  it was lovely to have a relaxed evening and catch up with everything on (as Deborah has mentioned to me several times) "very comfy" sofas. Jess and I were able to recount our eventful tube journey in which we managed to get on the wrong train despite checking several maps and actually knowing which branch of the Northern line wanted to get on. The team have agreed that we are not allowed to travel alone together again!

There was a lot to chat about so it ended up being quite a late night, but once we were all in bed everyone fell asleep very quickly- training for Guyana I think. :)

After an amazing cooked breakfast (thank you Adrian again) we got down to serious planning business. Our aims for the weekend included writing all of our session plans for Guyana, sorting out our kit lists, agreeing on a team budget and discussing all the forms and documentation that we need to organise before we travel to project. Jess had written each element of our to do list on a post it note, which were stuck on a picture of the Union Flag. When we had completed each task we could move the post it onto the Guyana Flag. We were all super excited when we could move actions from one flag to another :D

We spent the morning planning advocacy training  (Deborah, Miriam and Bec) and environment training (Amelia and Clare) by writing session plans. We will use these in Guyana to train Guides. We then all went for a short walk to pick up some fresh bread for lunch and then walked/ power walked back to the house because there were some rather ominous black clouds looming and we did not want to get wet.

After lunch we split into two different groups and planned leadership training for the adult leaders in Guyana (Clare and Bec) and icebreakers, energisers and songs that we will use to make up full days of training (Miriam, Deborah and Amelia). It is amazing how many different camp/ Guiding songs there are! We also all had a look at some Go-For-Its which we will use when we do camp training and just in case our training plans need to change. It was a busy day, but we got a lot of our to-do list ticked off and it was really exciting to see our project take shape :D.

In the evening we changed out of team uniform and went out for a meal together. The little Italian restaurant we went to was very busy but a lovely couple moved onto a smaller table so that we could fit in. The food was really tasty and we had a great time. We decided to skip pudding and instead went back to the house to eat cake, although we didn't eat any cake because we were too busy chatting!

Sunday involved drinking tea in sleeping bags, bacon sandwiches, talking about individual and group kit and moving our last few post it notes from one flag to the other. We also went through the huge amount of forms and the slightly scary risk assessment, as well as ordering 1000 more GOLD Guyana badges whilst eating homemade cake and drinking tea. This means we need to do lots more selling but the response so far has been amazing. Thank you to everyone who has already ordered a badge!!!

After lunch and a quick tidy up and pack all we had to do was evaluate. We all agreed that the weekend was very successful and we are now even more excited about Guyana! We have lot to do before we will be ready but we are definitely getting there.



After lots of hugs and goodbyes at various bus stops/ train stations we were all on our way home. Only 9 weeks to go...

:D

Lots of GOLD love

Miriam xx