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My special days of the week

By Miana Badd
July 22, 2009 at 3:05 pm

The Refugee Unit opened a Monday Club social drop-in where we relax in the afternoon and spend social time with clients. I am part of a group My special days of the week of volunteers who runs the Monday Club. This is what happens………

Monday Club afternoons are fantastic afternoons. Many of our service users come to socialise. They are all from different backgrounds. They make friendships, learn English, play games or teach others games from their home countries.

After preparing tea and snacks, we all sit together on one big table and have something to eat before we start doing different activities. I love times like these when we feel relaxed and do not have to talk about work, just enjoy ourselves for a few hours like one big family.

There are ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) volunteer tutors. They come in and teach participants how to speak , read and write in English. The service users and some volunteers are very excited to increase their knowledge.

The tutors’ work hard at this and soon the clients can communicate fairly well. When they are able to get a place at college they often continue coming to come to the club as well.

We have several games: Scrabble, Chess, Domino, Rummikub, Jenga and many others. Different people are good at different games.

My favourite is Scrabble. I like learning more dictionary words and this game is all about.

We also organise guests from different places to come in and teach us different things like jewellery making and animation. Staff from the Burrell collection sometimes bring some artefacts and tell us about them, we have also had a story storyteller. Often other Red Cross services get involved: Therapeutic Care volunteers offer massage and participants have received a First Aid Awareness session.

Volunteers Margaret and Ronni Gray teach us about the history of Scotland and their culture. On St Andrew’s Day we learnt how to dress in kilts, dance in the Scottish way and we tasted different types of food and drink. This was very exciting, learning something new, and we made a lot of mistakes.

We also get the opportunity to visit Glasgow’s historical sites. In our day-to-day life we stay in Scotland but do not get time to see different places. With the Monday Club we get the time to go on these outings.

We are so lucky that, every harvest season, Pollok Park give us fresh vegetables from their gardens for everyone to take home.

And this is one of the reasons why the service users like the Monday club.

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Tags: orientation service, refugees

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