So long, farewell...

So, here's our last blog post about our time in Latvia - sorry it's a few days late, real life seemed to take over!!

Monday found us packing, last minute shopping, repacking to fit everything into our bags, and then finally in a place called The Hedgehog In the Fog (named after a very bizarre Latvian cartoon!) for a final meal and catch up with our friends. Thank you to everybody who turned up to say goodbye, and a special thank you for our gifts - you should have heard the squeal when we were presented with Latvian neckers!! We were all sad to say goodbye to our new friends but we know we'll see you again :-)

Tuesday, we milled about in the hostel for the morning, along with some REALLY last minute shopping (who can resist a hat scarf?!) and then headed to the airport.

At 4.33pm GMT Tuesday, Team Latvia landed on UK soil. We're pretty confident we can say that we had one of the best arrivals a GOLD team has ever had - landing early, collecting baggage smoothly, and well, let's just say it was all pretty perfect! Alice was asked the all important question - were we the best GOLD team ever? - She said yes!!

That's all for now - we have reports to write, and our debrief in December, but mostly, that is our GOLD project over. Thank you all once again for your support throughout the last year, whether that was emotional, physical or financial - we couldn't have done it without you, and whilst there is nothing of substance to view from our efforts, we feel positive about our project! We want to wish next years team all the luck in the world, and to LSGCO, you have so much potential, keep working to become whatever you want to become!

GOLD Love,
Team Latvia 2014 x

What a busy weekend...

Our last weekend in Latvia has been hectic!! After meeting with 1st Riga on Friday night, we jumped on a train and headed to Juanogre, where Liga's sister and grandma live. They very kindly let us take over their living room and kitchen for the weekend! After cooking up some fajitas, we headed to bed ready for a busy day on Saturday.

We were up at 8, had pancakes and cleared up a bit, and out the door by 9.15. Alice, Laura and Net headed to Kegums, a town nearby. In Kegums they have a unit already but had been into the school to do a bit of recruiting. We were heading to the event they had set up for potential new kids! Although there went many there we had a great time telling them about WAGGGS and WOSM and all sorts of good stuff!! Afterwards, we headed back to Ogre via the hydroelectric dam - apparently the highlight of Kegums!

In the meantime, Toni, Lizzie and Sarah went back to Liga's unit for the second time. They played some more get to know you games for the new ones, as well as a couple of wide games. It was awesome to see some familiar faces and Liga told us that all the new cubs, brownies, scouts and guides had kept coming back after our first meeting with them two weeks ago - Yay!

Lunch time saw us munching more Latvian food in Ogre, followed by a chat with a Rover and older Guide in a fabulous little tea room whilst Liga had a parents meeting. Then back to Juanogre for last minute prep before the Rangers appeared!

With the Rangers, we ran some body confidence activities, which was really interesting - particularly comparing the differences between the UK and Latvia. After the serious stuff, we let them loose in the kitchen with all of our leftover food from the last three weeks. 50 minutes later, they were serving a yummy 3 course meal, including garlic bread and tuna salad starter, vegetable and bean casserole with chicken mince for the non-vegetarians, with tortillas and pitta breads on the side, followed by ice cream, baked apple and chocolate for dessert! We were all very satisfied after! The Rangers kindly left us a mountain of washing up to do before we went to bed - pretty sure they used every item of crockery in the house - thanks girls!

More pancakes followed on Sunday morning (the Rangers hadn't managed to use all the flour and eggs - what a shame!) and back to Riga we went. During the afternoon we planned for our evaluation and this evening found us in a restaurant surrounded by paper, burgers, pens, chips, post-it-notes, and dips! The evaluation went really well and we all found positives in things we hadn't even considered before! Both the UK and the Latvian members came away with some plans for future projects - whether that's GOLD, on a national level or just simple things they can do in their units!

One more full day in Riga and lots to do, so it's off to bed now in preparation!!

GOLD love,
Team Latvia x

An interview with Emily!

Today we visited the 1st Riga Cubs and Brownies. Whilst we were sitting outside finishing off our final prep, we were spotted by three of the members, who chatted happily away to us!

During the meeting, I pulled one of the girls away for a quick interview - paparazzi style!

How long have you been a brownie?
About 10 months. I've been on 5 camps and made my promise on my second camp.

Where you happy to make your promise?
Really happy. The promise makes you happy and you can be a brownie a lot better.

What do you normally do in meetings?
Play games and think about things that we need to do like what to take on camps and why drugs are bad and things like that.

How many knots do you know?
About 5

Do your friends know you're in brownies?
Yes. My best friend thinks I talk about it too much, but other friends think it's cool.

Do you want to be in guiding forever?
Yeah! I'll go to camps and when I grow bigger I will be a leader.

What's the best thing about guiding?
All of it. Being a better person.

Why do you think being a brownie has made you a better person?
Now I have a law that I should follow and when I'm a brownie it makes me feel like I'm a better person and it makes me a better person.

After that, Emily ran off to join in our game of scout, scout, guide (also known as duck, duck, goose!). At the end of the meeting, Emily stayed behind to personally thank us for the meeting, saying she'd learnt a lot about scouting and guiding and she'd had lots of fun, so we were all really happy with that!!

Now we're off to stay at Liga's grandma's house for the weekend - we're not sure on our Internet access for the weekend so this might be it until Sunday night!

GOLD Love,
Team Latvia x

Latvia's Golden Autumn

Whilst being in Latvia, we've been asked several times if we had been or were going to Sigulda... Every time we responded no, we hadn't been and were told we 'should go, it's very beautiful this time of year.'

Today, we found ourselves with an almost free day (just a meeting with Liga this evening that we didn't need to plan for) so after a bit of investigation, we decided to head to Sigulda. We also invited along Liene, who has been fabulous at translating for us, and we wanted to spend a bit more time with her!

An early start found all 7 of us on the bus at 815am, and heading out of Riga listening to the quality radio, playing tunes such as Faith and Hips Don't Lie. At Sigulda, we found the tourist information and headed out to see the sights! Whilst we were there we visited two castles, two highly graffiti-ed caves (carving dating back to 1667, not just casual graffiti!), at least two churches, climbed two towers, went on a cable car across the valley, walked up and down a couple of hills (Latvian mountains!), saw the walking stick park, and the folk statues park. We also found time for a wander around some stalls and some of us bought tiny walking sticks!

I think we were there a few weeks too late to see the autumn colours in full swing, but there were some incredible views all the same, especially from the top of the towers... The Latvians are right - You SHOULD visit Sigulda!

When we got back to Riga, we had half an hour chill out in the hostel before the best text ever 'hey girls, are you hungry? Do you fancy dinner?' yes Liga, we were hungry!! Up and out again, off to a Latvian buffet place with very good food! While we were eating we discussed plans for our final few days in Latvia (we're cramming four meetings into 24 hours!) and some more programme stuff and had a bit of chat about GOLD as a whole. It was a really useful (and yummy) dinner meeting!

Now we're back for an early-ish night before packing and repacking again and planning tomorrow!!

Back into the swing of it...

Monday, luckily, was a free day. We were all fairly exhausted post-camp, so it was lovely to have the day to potter around the hostel, sort our washing, and do a bit of casual sightseeing for those interested. We found a lovely little tea room with comfy floor seats, and a nice view over the canal - a great place to catch up with diaries and write postcards! 

Tuesday (today), we were back to work with a bit of planning and a fantastic visit to the Sea Cubs we saw last time. We started with a rendition of I'm Being Eaten By A Boa Constrictor, which was very funny and then began the main meeting... After they had shown us morse code last week, we got them playing our semaphore game that we'd done with a previous unit. They really enjoyed it, and Valdis even took home our resources so he can use them again!

After semaphore, we brought out the parachute and played fruit salad and sharks, which kept them entertained! As this was the last time we are seeing them, we decided to donate the parachute to them as well! It's the perfect size for their unit and I'm sure they'll have lots of future fun playing with it!

Apparently after the Latvia 2013 team visited the group, the boys spent the rest of the year asking when 'the English girls are coming back?' so hopefully they'll be asking it again this year...

GOLD Love,

Team Latvia

Camping in the Forest

In Latvia, being a Ranger (same with Rovers) is much different to being in the UK - you have to be selected in order to make your promise. Until the time you are selected, you are a Ranger/Rover Candidate. Each year there are two Rover/Ranger camps, and these are the main opportunities to make those selections. The selection process is a very thoughtful one, with lots of personal conversations and deep discussions regarding the Scout/Guide laws and other areas. These discussions usually take place in the evenings around campfires, with other activities during the day (of the fun variety, of the thought-provoking variety, and sometimes mixing the two).

We were lucky enough to be invited along to one of their camps, and take part in their activities, and run our own sessions for them too. It was a fantastic weekend, action-packed, and as such, it's taken a while to work out the best way to blog about it without it turning into a 45 page essay. Finally - I drew out this map for you all so you can see what we did!

Map of the camp - click for full picture!

For us, one of our highlights was definitely our diversity training. Coming from the UK, we have a highly diverse society, but here in Latvia, it's not discussed much at all. We split the group in two (alphas and betas), provided each "culture" with different rules, and then sent "scientists" from each culture to the other to see what they could discover. Amongst other rules, the alphas really liked personal contact, but the betas didn't, and covered their ears shouting "wakka, wakka" every time someone touched them, creating some very funny scenes for all involved! The Rangers, Rovers and Candidates all really got into this, and everyone (including the GOLD team) learnt a lot from the process. 

Other highlights include: the food, learning new games to share with girls back in the UK, the mosquito in Net's ear (named Cliffords), learning more about the Rangers and Rovers, the beautiful forest, the fact that Sarah didn't fall over in the bog, watching Scouts get stuck in the swamp and digging shoes out, as well as attempting to swim through a very cold lake, the tick that came along as a joyrider back to Riga... amongst a lot of other fabulous moments. 

A massive thank you to LSGCO for letting us stay on camp with them and get involved in their activities and for getting fully involved in our activities! It was good, it was good, it was very very good!

Programme discussion and team building...

Since the last update, we've been busy! Yesterday we met with some of the programme team to discuss how they can continue to develop their programme. We told them in more detail how ours runs (from rainbow, brownie, guide and senior section), including the world famous chocolate go for it! We also discussed how they could take bits of our programme and create their own, taking into consideration the varying age groups and different roles within the organisations (for instance, there is currently no young leader programme within Latvia).
After that discussion (which conveniently happened over dinner), we also discussed some of the challenges the association is facing as they continue to develop, and how to work around these.  
We were also told more details about Ranger/Rover camp, which is super exciting!!

Today was spent planning, creating resources, packing and more discussion! We also visited 66th scouts and guides and ran some team building activities as well as some scouting/guiding activities (and sometimes mixed!). It was a fab evening for us, and hopefully for the participants too!! Fun fact of the day: no Latvian words start with the letter w - cue some very confused scouts/guides when the words WAGGGS and WOSM appeared in one of our games

Over the next few days, we are heading out to Ranger/Rover camp. We're really excited about it, and we've been told our tent has a heated element :-D we're currently collapsed on some bean bags in a chill out room in the hostel throwing out some extra ideas for things we can do on camp. Off to bed soon ready for our early start!

A day in the life...

Today's blog takes you step by step through... I was going to say "an average day" but on GOLD, there is no such thing!  But here's today anyway...

8.18am - wake up in the hostel, it's not quite time to get up yet so most of us are still dozing. I'm trying to work out whether it's raining outside for the first time this trip...

8.39am - alarm clocks have gone off and people are starting to move, after a couple of compulsory snoozes obviously! Oh and good news - it's not raining!! 

9.11am - we're all up, dressed and sorting bags/breakfast, whilst dancing to cheesy tunes! C'est la vie!

9.43am - an intense game of Finland versus Sweden broke out on the ice hockey table - Finland came out on top with a 3-0 victory. 

10.01am - breakfast has arrived!! Tuck in :-D

10.46am - we're off to see some sea scouts this evening, and we thought as we'd be by the sea, it would be worth a visit. Because of this, we did all our planning and resource buying yesterday (organised!). After much debate, and a look on Google maps, we decided we could leave around 3 and still have fun at the beach. We are in the Baltics after all. 

11am - Leaving later means we have plenty of time to do the boring chores like... sorting out washing! Whoop!

11.27am - the team have split into a wandering through the market team, a shopping for dinner team and a getting extra sleep team - we'll leave you to guess who's in which team!!

1.26pm - the sleeping team have finally woken up (I admit, I was team leader!) to find a couple of people cooking and everyone else doing journal-y stuff. It's good to have these relaxing times in amongst the planning, running sessions and doing stuff!

2pm - lunch time. Today we have a spread of ham, salami, cheese (variety), lettuce, rolls, bread, mayo, crisps, yoghurt, fruit and cakey biscuit things, with iced tea and squash to drink. 

3.02pm - we've just left the hostel, and heading to the train station... Some people are in swimming costumes ready for a quick dip, some of us are more sensible!

3.22pm - on the train. The best thing about Latvian trains is that we can sit in a little booth together, all six of us! The bad news is there's no room for our feet!!

3.47pm - we're in Lielupe! After a brief glance at the map, we head towards the sea down a leafy road - very pretty!

3.58pm - stop for bon bon.

4.08pm - BEACH!!!! 

5.08pm - one hour on the beach, including swimming in the Baltic Sea, paddling, posing for photos, drawing in the sand, and then wrapping up warm again!! Almost sea scout time...

6.21pm - we've found the school we're meant to be running the meeting in, but not the cubs. We're currently wandering around the school attempting to find them but instead we've found some random Latvian boys fighting with sticks in the woodwork classroom! Potential cub scouts! 

6.50pm - the cubs have prepared a track through the woods - we're following the tracks... Easier to do when they've pointed them in the right direction in the first place!! 

7.10pm - we've found the chocolate at the end of the trail and we're started on our international activities - one from Mexico (hello our cabana!) and one from Japan (hello scout jamboree!)!

7.30pm - we're heading back to the train station now, following Philips, a cub scout who was asked to show us the way!

8.53pm - we're back in the hostel, some of us in PJs, waiting for food to be ready! Toni (our unofficial group cook) has made chilli tonight :D Tonight the plan is to sort out photos, back them up, and have a discussion about tomorrow... we're meeting a couple of the board members to talk about programme ideas for the Guides and Scouts tomorrow evening! Exciting. 

That's all for now - we'll update again soon!

Riddles, hikes and counting in Latvian...

Yesterday saw us out hiking with the brownies and guides. We met at central station, jumped on a train, and travelled to Smãrde. Along the way, we were given some riddles to figure out. We've listed them at the bottom - if you can get all five, we'll send you a postcard! When we got off the train, we played a couple of get-to-know-you games, and then set off on our adventure.

After about 10 minutes, the brownies were already asking how far we'd walked, and how long was left! It's good to know it's not just British brownies and guides who are like that!! The walk gave us a great chance to find out more from the leaders about Latvian Scouts and Guides, their international experiences, and what they wanted to do in the future. It was also a brilliant chance for the brownies to attempt to teach us Latvian - we're not so good at the minute! Maybe we'll get to 20 by the end of the trip!

After a while, we ended up at a random 'castle', where the brownies, guides, leaders and GOLDies took part in traditional castle games, including archery, dominoes, hoopla, and skittles. After that, we cooked hot dogs on a bbq, as well as bananas and chocolates, before heading to a different train station at Milzkalne.

We had a fabulous day, and we learnt lots and the brownies certainly enjoyed the novelty of us being there!! Before we disappear for the night, don't forget the riddles...

Riddles:
1) two heads, six legs
2) you can see a pile but you can't see the thrower
3) landlord sings without a book
4) beautiful flower in the lake, in the day it blooms white in the morning and evening red
5) red man in a sauna, green beard outside

Comment your answers!!
GOLD Love,
Team Latvia!

The Great Egg Drop...

Today was our first day with Brownies and Guides, and, as it's a joint organisation, Cubs and Scouts! We travelled to Ogre, a city about 45 minutes from Riga, to meet up with Liga and her unit. We were met at the station by a lovely scout called Mareks, who showed us the way to the Scout and Guide Museum where they hold their meetings. After a short introduction from Liga, we got on with our activities... 

Starting with some name games in the two ages groups...

Then joining together for getting into alphabetical order, in limited space!

Then into smaller teams. Each team was given an egg...

To decorate and name, and cherish forever...

Then we had small activities, including moving a ball from one tree to another, down paper tubes...

And standing on a very small bit of paper singing a song...

To earn resources to create something to protect their egg...

As the egg was dropped from the window...

They all survived!

At the end of the meeting, we did an evaluation - pretty successful! And then went into Ogre with Liga, Davis (one of the Rovers), Anate (one of the older guides who is hoping to make her Ranger promise this weekend), and two of the younger scouts. We had some fabulous Latvian food (chicken and pork, and mushroom sauce, or cheese...), and then headed back to the station, with the two younger Scouts leading the way (and occasionally shouting "come on, only 9 minutes!"). We made it back to Riga, and Lizzie, Toni, Alice and Laura headed out to get ice cream, whilst Net and Sarah collapsed in the hostel!

We're off for a hike tomorrow, with a Guide unit, and potentially some Brownies, as they are hoping to start up a new Brownie unit there -it'll be great to talk tactics with the leaders whilst we're walking!

Early night tonight though!
GOLD love,
Team Latvia

5 things we've learnt in Latvia

We've been in Latvia for over 24 hours now, and we've learnt some important things already!

1. Groceries are cheap here in Latvia!
We bought a LOT of food, and it came to a surprisingly cheap amount of €27!

2. St Peter's church was rebuilt after the second world war to include a baroque style tower.
We have been cultured, you see! We had a small wander through Old Town, Riga and saw a few of the buildings. We're going on a walking tour tomorrow to visit more places :-)

3. Riga has lots of Japanese restaurants!
We're not sure why either!

4. Latvian scouts and guides run meetings all over the world!
During the second world war when Latvians got displaced to Germany, they carried on running Latvian Scout meetings in the displaced person camps. Then when the war ended and they moved to USA, Canada and various other locations, they carried on still and now they meet up every four years. At the latest meet up, 30 Scouts and Guides from Latvia made it to New York, which in an organisation of only 500 is quite impressive!!

5. You spend more time waiting at traffic lights than you'd think!
Latvia has pedestrian crossings that count down how many seconds you have left until you can cross. We have spent approximately 8 minutes 20 seconds waiting at traffic lights today!

So there you go! Also, important things to note that didn't quite make the cut of the top 5 are that you can cook pasta in a microwave and that greeny bananas can taste yellowy!

More tomorrow!
GOLD love,
Team Latvia x

The adventure begins...

Today, we woke up raring to go! The taxi arrived at 8am, with a really helpful driver. After much debate, the bags were loaded, along with Net and Sarah, and the rest of the team walked to the station! After a short train journey, we arrived at Gatwick, checked our bags in, and after minor watch related disaster, we found breakfast and eventually our plane! The flight was uneventful, and we slept and read. At the other end, we were met by Liene, who got us on a bus and took us to our hostel. Then we decided to have a wander around Riga - we'd been walking for about two minutes before Martins, one of the Latvian board, caught up with us!

At 6pm, we met Liga, Martins and Eduards for a meeting about our project. It was really interesting to get to know more details of what we'll be getting up to and also to find out more about the background of the organisation, and to be able to see how the work that GOLD is doing is impacting the association. The 3 Latvians, particularly Liga, were really enthusiastic about Guiding and Scouting and were really passionate about growing the movement in Latvia!

After our meeting, we had a fabulous meal out, and wandered back to our hostel. We're now curled up on a sofa in the hostel discussing all that we've found out and the differences between LSGCO and Girlguding in the UK. It'll be bed time soon!!

Tomorrow will be a chilled day, planning, exploring and buying new watches, and generally getting ready for the adventure ahead!

More updates soon...

GOLD love,
Team Latvia x