First Day at Halbourne Hall

---

Today i turned up at Halbourne Hall at 10 thanks to my parents, who drove me across from Market Deeping early morning. I met the rest of the U.K volunteers, for both the Glasgow and Manchester placements. To start with Charlie ( Manchester helper) got us to do some team-building exercises, so we got to know each other names. After this we started to do a welcome plan for our Pakistan counter-parts. We decided to write and perform a song for them, and make a poster. I decided to make the poster as im not much of a song-writer!! After lunch we all did our personal projects on the topic of our choice on Pakistan. I was first, and did about 'how much control does religion have in Pakistan'. After doing my project i had postive feedback on what i had found out and how i structured it. In total our projects went on for 3 hours. This had finished just in time for dinner. After finishing dinner we had just 10 minutes to get ready for the Pakistan counter-parts turning up. I helped my partner Raheel to our room, and dropped off all his stuff and made sure his comfortable. As we were walking back up i started to ask him about himself, he has a degree in socialology, just started to learn the flute, and it was his first every time out of Pakistan!!! We went up to the 'welcome' room we had set up a few hours before and performed our welcome song. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it and claped away with us. After this we had some announcements and then had our own free time. This was at about 10 pm. Most the Pakistanis' went to bed as they had a very long journey that day. I stayed up for a while playing cards with the rest of the pakistanis' and the U.K volunteers. After doing this for a couple of hours i decided to hit the hay as well.

And that was my first day on my volunteer work.

---

Photos

My counter-part Raheel
This is Raheel, he is 23 and from Lahore, Pakistan

Some of the Volunteers
These are some of the volunteers who are going on the Placement.