Wow my first amnesty week!
Where to start?
Well after arather long-winded journey we finally managed to make it to Donegal, Bundoran (Please don’t ask me where it is, after trying to get several people to explain the geography of the area I still have no idea!), when we got to our restaurant, we met our southern allies.
Although during the first meal we didn’t get much talking done with them, as we were all far too hungry to bother ourselves with being social.
But the first evening was spent happily, doing ice-breakers and just generally getting to know the people we were going to spend the next two days with!
We were woken up bright and early on the Saturday morning (well it was only 8 o’clock, so it felt bright and early for a statuary morning!),we all had breakfast at the ad venture centre next door to our accommodation,which involved several hundred thousand pieces of toast, and as far as I couldtell a lot of butter and jam!
But we were al thrown into our first activity of themorning, which was a role play exercise involving eight of us being certaincharacters you might have in social situations (or in this case an amnesty weekend).
Then we had quite a few hours of a drama workshop, I think Iheard a few complaints later of ‘If I ever have to shake an other persons andor ask them their favourite colour it will be the last thing I’ll ever do!’ butnone the less, our representations of the death penalty, domestic violence andwrongly treated prisoners got everyone hot under the collar.,
We all settleddown to a lunch of soup before finding out more about campaigns and watchingseveral videos, which showed us (and inspired me) of the campaigns which hadbeen run by young people like ourselves and in their amnesty groups.
Our evening was spent watching the DVD ‘Perspholis’ and just generally having good ‘Banter’ and ‘Craic”
Most of us were evening more tired on the Sunday morning as they were on the Saturday, as the staff found out, but our shouting that more coffee and toast was need before we were going to leave the breakfast table!
Dan’s photographs of earlier campaigns gave us all inspiration for our next challenge, which was to design placards for a campaignfor womens rights in Iran. I don’t think the people of Bundoran had really seenany thing like it before but as we marched steadily onwards with all the girls(and boys!) in tradition hijab head wear, with our banners and placards, we waked along the beach, trying to look as grim and impressed as possible but most of us failed at that!)
And so our weekend came to a nice close. I had made newfriends, got loads of advice on how I was going to start up an amnesty group at school and had had a really good weekend1 Thank-you!
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