I Challenge you to sort out…INJECTIONS, FUNDRAISING, TWITTER, BLOGGING

Well, what a weekend!  This weekend was the first weekend training meeting for team 2011 and it was FULL ON.  A jam packed schedule started at 11am on Saturday as the team arrived to the Indian YMCA in London.  A little taste of India smack bang in the centre of London town!  One of the greatest, most authentic and cheapest places to get Indian food around.  But I digress…

Through the training we aim to cover as much as we can to help prepare and challenge our team.  Have a look at the Challenges to see what specific things we challenge the team to do.  We covered so much in the meeting that I don’t want to go through everything one by one, but some of my favourite bits were:

• Working with children and Behaviour Management (particularly with Yemma acting as  a naughty child).  We spent an hour training the team about not only how to work with children, but how to work with children who don’t speak English.
• Coming SO CLOSE to winning the culture quiz (we was robbed!) It was the same quiz as last year, and whilst I wasn’t there last year Yemma Kelly was, and frankly she should have done better on my behalf!
• Seeing the results of the life-sized Monopoly Challenge – particularly Lydia trying to claim that a picture of her trying to get into a post box was using a method of transport! We sent the whole team out in groups to find as many of the places on the Monopoly Board as they could.
• Food.
• Cathy’s Tamil Lesson – and I was mightily impressed by the skills of our current team – they’ve already learnt 1 – 10 and their pronunciation is spectacular!  A link to the lesson notes will follow shortly.
• Activity ideas – I particularly like Funfair Games.  We gained new ideas for activities to do with the kids we work with in India by getting the team to pool all of their ideas.
• Social Networking – thank you Charlie Griff – who knew about how much money you could make online for MINIMUM EFFORT.  He told us all about the Million Dollar Homepage.  Looks like a mess doesn’t it?  But the guy who made it is now a millionaire!  Maybe this is how we can afford to pay for the rebuilding project at YMCA Fort School in Chennai?
• Food.

So, all in all it was fairly manic, but I don’t think we can complain.  What an amazing weekend.  I am now looking forward to seeing the team popping up on Twitter, and starting to Blog on the website.

That’s all for now.  More to follow!