Long Term Volunteer Team

We have permission of the volunteers to post pictures and say a bit about them. To start there are pictures of Katharina or "Rina" (top left), Robbie (top right), Christian (bottom left), and Marian (bottom right). Rina is a volunteer from Germany/Switzerland, she is 20, she is very artistic. Robbie was at Corrymeela from January until December. He is from Ballycastle/England and is now living in Belfast hoping to study Social Work in September. Christian is from El Salvador, 28, and a journalist for a major newspaper in El Salvador. Marian is from Ohio, US, is 23 and has a psychology degree. I will continue posting more later. Any questions just post them.

Update

Getting back into work has been nice and slow so far. The volunteers had a two night stay at Corrymeela Knocklayd where we relaxed and shared our "life maps" with each other. After this Niki and I worked with a study group from Bethel College, Kansas State. Yesterday we had off so I went on a 2 and a half hour walk to Murlaugh Bay with Kai where we got picked up and brought back to Corrymeela. It was a great walk with cliffs, old coal mines and ruins along the way. At Murlaugh Bay we had a spectacular view of Scotland. Today I am working with Religious Education students from an integrated school. On the weekend the site is full with community members and we are welcome to join in on the sessions. Next week Wednesday we will get official training in group facilitation which will be useful for our resumes and our work here at Corrymeela.

Christmas and New Years

Merry belated Christmas and Happy New Years to all of you. We've spent the last two weeks away from Corrymeela and just arrived back yesterday.

Before Christmas we stayed a lovely little hostel just outside of a small town called Malin Head on the most Northernly point of the island or Ireland which ironically enough is actually located in the Republic. The hostel was nussled into a little cove and operated by a lovely old Irish couple. We did a lot of walking and relaxing, we almost bought live crab right off the harbor one day to cook ourselves, but then chickened out.

Christmas itself we spent at Kilcranny, a centre similar to Corrymeela except much smaller and more focused on being enviornmentally friendly. It's located just outside of Colraine, about a half an hour from Corrymeela. There were five of us, and it was all of our first Christmas away from home, so we attempted to blend together some of our traditions, and come up with a sort-of-Christmas. Much of our time was spent taking turns of the phone. However we did manage to find a Church of Ireland Christmas eve, my dad read us a Christmas story over the phone and we did throw together a small Christmas dinner.

Following Christmas Jason and I headed south in Northern Ireland to Newcastle. There we made our first discovery of a bed and breakfast. Newcastle is just outside of the Mourne Mountains and so we managed to get in some short hikes. Then... we both got food poisoning, something I highly recommend avoiding at all costs.

New Years we spent back in Belfast with our host family, some of there friends and some other volunteers. It was a lovely evening. And now at last it's good to be home.

For the next few days we'll be at Knocklayd on a retreat meant for our volunteer team to get to know eachother even better! It'll be good to be with the whole team again after a little break.