Previous events – Croydon

24 young people and 6 volunteers made our way to Croydon meeting house on the Friday evening. We introduced ourselves to old and new friends, playing games and discussing our expectations for the weekend. After a tiring week and some lively games we had dinner and an epilogue.

Saturday morning we made breakfast and pack lunches for our trip to Lloyd park, there we had our lunch, played rounders, Frisbee, football as well as some well loved Quaker games. The sun brought the ice cream van out and we contentedly walked back to the meeting house. There we met up with James Nidal Agha who had just arrived back from working as an ecumenical accompanier in Palastine/Israel. He gave a very interesting and dynamic talk on the work he had been doing and the challenges the Palestinians face, he answered and raised a lot of very thought provoking questions and resolved our solidarity in supporting the peace making work and the boycott by BYM.

Thanks to the young people’s help we prepared and ate a lovely dinner, after this we played some games and then got into to small teams for a quiz – the level of harry potter knowledge is somewhere between impressive and mad! After this excitement we went to an epilogue lead by two of the young people.

Sunday we were joined by two more young quakers and this also brought us a chance to discuss ideas for London Link group and get feedback, as well as our current plans to try and involve more young people in the event planning. We were lucky enough to have a talk from one of our volunteers; Inga, about the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage that she attended and how her Quakerism evolved from it. We then joined Croydon Quakers for Meeting, a quick lunch after and then headed home.