Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Most Fun Ever. In the world. Ever.

I loved many things about Greenbelt this year.  Work has, as regular readers may have noticed, made me a little cynical, and Greenbelt has helped to return the joy of helping people.  As support stewards, we help by wandering around being a presence, we help Greenbelters by being available and dealing with situations as they happen, and we help other stewards by providing a bit of support where it's needed.  And we help each other with a large dose of mocking.  It works for everyone, I think.

Not everyone appreciates us, however.  One kind man spent ten minutes explaining to Guilty and me that what we were trying to do was pointless and offered to spend the whole night following us around to point this out.  As we were planning to have officially The Most Fun Night Stewarding Ever*, we declined his kind offer.

It's been quite a quiet year, mainly - I'm sure we've looked for more lost children in one night in previous years than we did in the whole festival this year - possibly because there were a few occasions when we reunited parents and children before we managed to get the radio call out.  But we've done some things which I'm really quite proud of.  We found a mother wandering round in the rain with her small boy at 1 am as the sound of the rain on the tent was scaring him, and we re-directed her to somewhere safer to spend the night.  We dealt with a few people who had spent longer in the beer tent than was good for them and stopped them causing more problems for themselves and others.  We helped some girls who had lost their tents in the middle of the night.  We gave directions, smiled a lot, pointed out toilets and wandered round the campsites drinking Greenbelters' coffee (really, the best way to get moved off a campsite is to get a full cup of coffee), eating their cake and being the friendly face of Greenbelt.

What I remember most about Greenbelt is spending time with my team, talking and messing about, having loads of fun and getting caught doing silly things by my team leaders when really I should be looking responsible...  But I feel proud about the added bonus of helping Greenbelters to have a better festival.

*With some success, I might add.






1 comment:

Merlin said...

I think you were full of success. Thank you.