Selection

In the midst of the worst blizzard in thirty years I made my way up to the Hebredian Isle of Coll to commence the “Project Trust experience” – a four day selection course. After just over twelve hours including hours of long delays, I made it to the Oban backpackers hostel and met some of the other volunteers. The next morning was an early one, as the ferrie to Coll left at around 6 am.

When we arrived we were congratulated for arriving as out of the 30 or so volunteers expected there were just 18 of us due to the weather. The selection course was very intense and started as soon as we had arrived at  Project Trust headquarters. There were some  activities including team building and practicing Ceilidh dancing in preparation for the farewell Ceilidh. However many of the other activities were more nerve-racking, one of these was the teaching exercise; we were given 15-20 mins to plan a ten minute lesson for our group, this was assessed by Project Trust Staff. Another daunting activity was the walk up the highest “mountain” on Coll, which wasn’t really very big at all but the bitter wind and ice made it an unpleasant experience!

We stayed with local families for the duration of our stay on Coll, usually two people per family. Me and another volunteer, Carolien had the pleasure of staying with Jean and Andrew Peddie in their beautiful house. Thankfully the woodburner kept us lovely and warm in the evenings because, with plenty of outdoor activities during the day we were pretty cold!

One of the most daunting activities we had to do was the twenty minute presentation on an aspect of the Isle of Coll, as we were told about this on the first day and the presentation was on the last day we felt the pressure as we struggled to think of a presentation that hadn’t been done before. We trawled through about twenty issues of Coll’s annual magazine! As Carolien and I were in different groups we decided to work together and looked at some of the archeology on Coll. Andrew who we were stating with was particularly helpful and to add interest to our presentation he leant us a ancient stone tool he found on the beach and a coconut washed up in the beach!

One of the traditional activities is digging lazy beds (to plant potatoes in) but the soild was too frozen for this, so instead we dug sand from the beach to put into the lazy beds (to improve calcium content) this was phyically the toughest challenge as the sand bags very extremely heavy! On the last morning of our stay on Coll we were split up and assigned a community project. Me and three other volunteers went to the Island’s Primary school whilst other people went to plant new trees, do gardening etc. I ended up helping make lunch in the canteen, doing photocopying, going to the local church to put up the christmas tree for the carol service and cleaning this was all suprisingly good fun. We then headed back and did our presentations before leaving the island to face the long journey home.

The selection course was a really challenging but exciting experience, meeting loads of really nice people and achieving things you didn’t think were possible. We had to wait about two weeks to find out if we were selected, it was nerve-racking…. but I was selected. My three possibilities were Guyana, Uganda and Honduras with me most likely to go to Guyana. I only heard a few days ago that my project was confirmed to be in Guyana.