The Briefing

There was a fair bit of a lot of organisation involved in my trip to Reading for the GAP briefing, then heading to Denmark to visit my boyfriend, and still managing to return to Luxembourg in time for work on Monday morning (something which I didn’t, in fact, quite manage). 

The GAP briefing was held at Reading Town Hall.  Despite being the only GAP Fiji’er who had to cross the channel to get there, it seemed that everyone else had had to get up just as early, if not earlier than me, to travel down from various corners of Scotland, or up from Cornwall, in the case of Helen, to get the briefing.  I arrived way too early and spend an hour and a half browsing Reading station.  The main thing that I noticed is that there don’t seem to be any rubbish bins.  I spent a good 10 minutes looking for a bin to throw my empty tea-cup into, and in the end found nowhere other than the toilet floor.

GAP Activity Projects organise briefings for all their volunteers, and I found the group of countries at this particular briefing pretty interesting; we were all heading to either Fiji, Vanuatu, Malaysia, or, wait for it….. Germany.  Not quite sure how the Germany-bound volunteers were supposed to take the various long talks about the dangers of unsterilised water, the need for mosquito repellent and the joys of diaarrhea.  A lot of what we were told at the briefing were things that I already knew, having read them in either the ‘Action Pack Booklet’ which GAP sent me, or in the Lonely Planet guide, which I flicked through. 

After this we were introduced to Peter and Margaret, a british couple who run the charity ‘Children of Fiji’.  They talked to us about Fiji in general, and also told us that they will be visiting us on our placements, as they come out to Fiji twice a year on business related to the charity.  They very kindly e-mailed me the photo which you can see above (click on the thumbnail), which was taken at the end of the briefing.

For me, the most interesting part was getting to meet the other volunteers heading for Fiji, and speaking to the ‘returned gappers’ who were there last year.  Not that what they told us was terribly reassuring – both of them had been admitted to hospital while in Fiji – but they were very enthuisiastic about Fiji and the projects… though they made it sound asthough they had just sat around drinking cava with the locals for the entire duration of their stay! 

Representatives from ‘Planet Wise’ were there to give us tips on safety, packing and health, the most useful of which were to bring a silk liner (mossies can’t bite through silk, apparently) and to buy most of our stuff out there, where it should be much cheaper.  Unfortunatley I had the worst attck of the giggles during the talk on health and hygiene.. no idea why.  The guy wasn’t even saying anything particularly funny, but once I’d started, I just couldn’t stop, which was a little embarrassing.
By this time it was 4 o’clock, and time for everyone to hurry off to get their trains and planes home.  I stayed behind to fill in the ‘health declaration form’, which had some great questions on it, for example “How many units of alcohol do you drink a week?” “Have you ever taken illegal substances, and if so which ones” or something along those lines.  Then it was time to say my goodbyes and head off towards a great night’s sleep at Stansted airport.