Our GOLD Journey

You may recall me talking about (or perhaps shrieking about?) the adventure I'm embarking on this summer.  I was selected, along with 47 other young women to represent Girlguiding in the UK, and travel abroad to share our experiences and knowledge of guiding.  In the UK we're incredibly lucky to have a well organised infrastructure which means we can provide amazing opportunities for the half a million or so members.  GOLD, Guiding Overseas Linked with Development, aims to spread the word around the world, giving young women a voice and a girls-only space where they can develop skills and have new experiences.  

The projects run by GOLD are designed to be sustainable and run for 3-5 years.  Once a year, a team of 6 heads out to the country and helps out, working on a volunteer project  to develop sustainable guiding.  This year, teams are heading out to Guyana, the Gambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Latvia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and my own team will be travelling to Armenia.  We didn't pick where we were going or who with, and we're going to work incredibly hard under less-than-comfortable conditions.  But a week ago, we all had our first briefing, met our teams and started planning and I think I can safely say that every single one of us is over the moon to be involved in something so amazing!

So I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce my team to you.  And what better way than by a scrapbook page?

This is my first page about the project and I knew I wanted to get in there with some travel supplies.  And it was a special page too, as being a part of GOLD is something I'm incredibly excited and honored to take part in.  What a great chance to use some special too-nice-to-use supplies?  

I've been hoarding these gorgeous stickers from Evalicious with cute layered buttons and punches, and I also took some pages out of the travel art journal to layer with.  I bought both of these over a year ago but both stickers and journal were so beautiful, I could hardly bear to part with them.  I always knew I wasn't going to use the journal as a journal, but I was going to take it to pieces.  But it looked so pretty all bound together that I put it off. 

But I'm really glad I've now got these supplies out and I'm ready to use them.  This is definitely the right project and I feel there are many more travel themed layouts in my future!  As soon as I stock up on vintage map paper from October Afternoon...

If you want to catch a better glimpse of us posing at the weekend with the Armenian flag, then you can hop over to our GOLD Armenia 2012 blog.  I'm updating our progress, our planning, our preparations and (when I can get internet access) I will write posts about the project when we're out there.

So here's to our GOLD journey!

Kisses xxx

P.S. During our first briefing, we assigned ourselves roles within the team.  A secretary, a treasurer, and so on.  And a documenter.  The documenter's job?  To take the photos.  To update the blog.  And MAKE THE SCRAPBOOK.  I thought my head would explode if I didn't volunteer to be documenter.

P.P.S. Due to my slightly over-excited volunteering to make the scrapbook, I am officially the Team Armenia Documenter :D