Monthly Motivation #1

So this is the official start of my Monthly Motivations feature, where I'm planning on getting people who are a part of NEST to share their reasons for taking part. This month, I asked Bridget for her motivations and she's come back with a fantastic piece of writing, when I only had a couple of paragraphs in mind. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did!

I had the perfect opportunity to settle down and do some work and then N.E.S.T came along.

I started rowing when I was 14 and it moved very quickly from one day per week to seven and then twice a day. Then before I knew it I was up at 5:30am to train before school, I was given permission to miss ‘personal development’ and PE so that I could catch up on the work that I would miss because of my evening training schedules. I was eating breakfast in my first lesson because I needed the extra calories when I was carb loading for the races, then I was revising for my A Levels on my lap in the middle of the boat trailer between races. The hardest

was going up and down the country and over to Ireland when I was trialling, trying to go through Biology past papers whilst prepping for land assessments. At 18 I won the National Championships and went on to race for England. Then I moved on to my senior career, rowed with Newcastle University for just over a year, training two to three times a day and competing regularly. I stroked the first eight which was a privilege and rowed with some girls who will most likely go on to compete at the Olympics. It was a huge pressure and often really took it out of me physically and psychologically. My shoulder and back started to deteriorate and by March 2016, I just couldn’t push my body any further. I was so frustrated because I didn’t feel like it was the right time to stop. When people would ask me why I had quit, I would cringe inside. That word sat very uncomfortably in the pit of my stomach.

When I stepped back to look at my life I suddenly realised that I wasn’t really sure who I was if I wasn’t a rower. Those essential years through puberty are where you try new things and hang out with different people, trying to build your identify. For me they had happened but in the very small world of Tyne Rowing Club. Most of my life was built around the sport, from when I slept to what I ate. Despite this, after the first two weeks of bewilderment, I began to relax somewhat into this new way of life. I could now take control of my own timetable and start to make some decisions for myself.

Three months down the line and I had managed to pull through second year having utilised the non-rowing hours to cram in some more revision. It was now the summer and my friend Catherine and I were jogging through the estate, my dodgy shoulder tapped into place. She told me about ‘The homework club’ which was a university volunteering project to help Syrian refugee children with their school work. I had been looking for a way to help for a while. Most of what I found was about fundraising or donating but I really wanted something hands on. I went to my first session a few weeks later. There were three or four children and their parents and around six or eight students volunteering. I didn’t really know what to expect but there was no structure as such, we came in and the parents sat their children down next to us and we tried to help them for a few hours. Phil, the volunteer coordinator at uni, was driving us back after the session. He mentioned a few more students were interested in volunteering but because spaces were limited he would always prioritise students who had been to the last session. From there I made a pact with myself never to miss a session. A few weeks later and I was hooked; Phil told the others and I that if we were interested we could become project leads and do whatever we wanted.

Our first step was to change the name and 18 months later we have two project managers, 28 project leads, 558 volunteers, 300 refugees and asylum seekers, public and private sector funding, sessions six days per week, plans for expansion and I even managed to graduate with a 2:1 and get onto an MSc. The rowing-shaped void in my life had been filled with N.E.S.T. We didn’t set out to create an organisation of this scale, it’s now a full time job and my rowing story seems to be replicating itself both in terms of increasing commitments and personally unimaginable success. Sometimes I sit back at our sessions, watch the 50 student volunteers and the 80 refugees laughing and learning together. I feel completely overwhelmed by it, every week, every day. The greatest race in the world couldn’t make me feel like this, to feel like you can help make a difference, that you are worth enough to make a difference.

It’s a complete honour to run N.E.S.T with my friends, quite a few of which I would now call family. Together we have created a community and we are changing the lives of the people who come to us for support. My life is very different now to how it was when I was training, I still get up at 5:30am but now it’s to reply to some emails or apply for some funding. I’ve swapped planning my training sessions to planning N.E.S.T lessons. I’ve got more out of N.E.S.T than I would ever be able to write down: family, friendship, a deeper understanding of what hardship means, what it is to persevere and how hope is magic. (Not forgetting all of those graduate employability skills, you know… time management and leadership and all that..)

Ultimately, there’s never going to be the right time to help, the refugee crisis is nothing new. You could wait until you’ve graduated, got a job, got some money, more time, more settled but people need help now. If you don’t make their problem your own, there is never going to be any urgency to solve these issues. Owing to the fact I’m still offered a Child’s single on my bus I might not be old enough to be talking so philosophically about life but we have put our hearts into this project so much so that it’s made us vulnerable emotionally in both a positive and negative light. The occasional ‘its just a student project’ ‘it’s not about you’ comments really, really sting and the stories we hear can make us feel numb but it’s all worth it if that one learner who came in isolated leaves feeling not so alone.

We have a long way to go and there’s nothing I want more in the world than to be part of this journey. Someone once described us ‘helpful idiots with romantic delusions of multiculturalism', I guess its a slight improvement on the ‘snowflake generation’ eh..

Bridge

Thanks for reading Bridge's post and happy volluntravelling,

The Voluntraveller