Eleri Hadaway
Eleri Hadaway
Belfast, Northern Ireland, September 2024 - June 2025
Hi! My name is Eleri and I’ll be spending nine months working with Fighting Words, a creative writing charity in Belfast, Northern Ireland. While I’m there, I’ll facilitate free story workshops for local schools, lead a creative writing club, and assist with the administrative tasks that keep the charity running! Read More About Eleri →

Don’t Be Worrying!

Well, well, well. Another two weeks have positively flown by, and I have lots to report. 

I am gaining more responsibility at work, and am starting to feel more like a legitimate staff member. I have a general sense of how everything works and I am able to manage my own work flow, instead of constantly following my colleagues around and peppering them with questions. I have begun workshop leader training, so that I can eventually be fully in charge of a workshop. There are a lot of unseen tasks that make a workshop possible, like organizing volunteers, considering additional needs or allergies in the class, making sure every moving part runs smoothly during the workshop, and updating records/procedures afterwards. It’s a balancing act that requires at least 10 mental tabs open at all times– it’s quite a challenge and great fun. Thankfully, they’re easing me into it so that I can learn each part without being overwhelmed. 

Another exciting work update is that I’m helping to develop the materials for Fighting Words’s pilot program for schools residencies. Normally, we only work with any given class once in a year. In the residency program, we will have six sessions with the same classes throughout the year. This gives us the opportunity to observe the students’ growth and development over the course of a whole school year. It’s lovely to hear feedback from teachers about how impactful our one-time workshops can be, but it’s even better to see the results for ourselves. Because the program is brand new and we’re kind of figuring it out as we go, I get to play a role in designing it! I have created materials for activities the children can do between workshops, which are intended to keep the characters fresh in their minds and encourage them to continue to engage with the stories we build together. I have created templates for character interviews, character passports, and tickets to any destination! I made sure to leave the instructions open-ended enough that they can take the assignment in any direction their creativity leads them.

My surroundings continue to fascinate me, and I have discovered more great places in Belfast and beyond. Some of my favorite discoveries this past couple of weeks were Hey Boba (their thai tea is SPECTACULAR), Sunflower Public House (with fiddlers jamming together and pizza so good it made me reevaluate my hatred for vegan cheese), the Botanic Gardens (my favorite plant was a tree with white flowers that looked like burrata), Mike’s Fancy Cheese Shop (I’m sensing a theme here), a vast array of charity shops (with good, bad, and ugly offerings in each), and the Belfast Central Library (I’m now a proud NI Libraries card-holder). 

Since I have Mondays off work, I try to take a day trip every Monday. Last week, I visited Cave Hill, which is colloquially known as the “sleeping giant”. Legend has it that the craggy facial profile created by the rock formations inspired Johnathan Swift to write Gulliver’s Travels. For the first hour or so of my hike, I was completely alone in the wilderness. The sun was out, the leaves sang their wind-rustled lullaby, and the clear air invigorated my body. Gazing at the tufts of golden-lit grass, the calm gray water of the loch below, the cotton-streaked sky above, I experienced the sublime. I was so overwhelmed by the natural beauty and its magnitude that my swirling thoughts were supplanted by electric currents of emotion. Now I get how Maria felt in The Sound of Music, because I truly wanted to sing and twirl (I restrained myself, with great effort). 

This past Monday, I went on a bus tour that traveled along the coast of Northern Ireland and ended at the Giant’s Causeway. The tour guide, Karl, was hilarious, patient, and very knowledgeable– all the things that you want a tour guide to be. We stopped at harbors, Game of Thrones filming locations, castles, restaurants, and distilleries. All throughout the day, Karl repeated the reassurance, “Don’t be worrying!” Don’t know where the toilets are at this stop? Don’t be worrying! Karl can point you in the right direction. Hungry? Don’t be worrying! Karl knows where to get the best ice cream in Northern Ireland. As someone who is quite prone to worrying, I loved his constant reminders. Karl put into words what I have been slowly learning over the last month: uncertainty is an inevitable component of adventure, but there’s no need to panic about it. The more that control has been seized from my hands, the happier I have been to relinquish it. I think “don’t be worrying” will be my motto while I’m here. I have tried so many new things with new people: book clubs, coffee dates, Oktoberfest, recipes, Boxercise, hair dye, GPS-less wandering, Gliders, baps, high church, small talk with strangers, Malaysian hot pot, Irish slang, the list goes on… As I’m sure you can imagine, not everything has gone perfectly, but don’t be worrying. I’m all the better for it!

Until next time,

Eleri x

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