One afternoon we attended Portsmouth Rotary meeting for lunch. The rotary is a club of people who fund different programmes and volunteer in their community. The people of the rotary were so welcoming and seemed to be very interested in our lives.
Samantha and I paired up to sit at a table together at the rotary and ate lunch –which was delicious- with members of the rotary who seemed to be very interested in our background and where we came from. They asked a lot of questions about our culture and the conflict in the North of Ireland and we, in turn, asked them questions about their lives in America.
We then played a really fun game which was in the style of a game show quiz hosted by Neill, the president of Friends Forever, where we were asked to answer different questions about ourselves.
After everyone had eaten, Eimear, Chelsea and I, gave speeches to the rotary about what our lives had been like growing up in Northern Ireland and how we felt about the conflict. Having to write a speech and then deliver it to a room full of adults wasn’t the easiest thing to do but it was something which helped me to gain a new perspective on the segregation in The North of Ireland, the idea of explaining things as simple as the division between Catholics and Protestants was at first a strange concept to me as it was something I had grew up with. It did however force me to think more about the society I had grown up in and helped me realise the impact it had on my life.
Overall, going to the Portsmouth rotary turned out to be a really good experience, we were welcomed by all the members and all of our speeches were received very well. It gave us the chance to talk about our lives at home and also learn a bit about American culture.
Tiarna (:
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