London Trip: The People

Super sorry that I was unable to update this sooner, you see my hard where I had stored all pics caught a virus and I'm getting it fixed and therefor have no photos to show whatsoever! >.< Don't you just hate when you have an awesome story to tell, but no pictures to prove it? Me too!

 

Well, I met lots of amazing people throughout the trip, and my favorite is definetely Susanna Darch, who was our chaperon the very first day and came to pick us up at Gatwick. She is extremely friendly and has been doing community work for nearly 12 years. She is also involved with British Youth Council (BYC) which is one of the organizations that thought us a lot during the trip. We also met several people from BYC including the chairperson (methinks) David, James (who is absolutely charming and taught us about democracy and various aspects of it), Alex (the youngest person we met from BYC who was a member of the British Youth Parliament and is very passionate about climate. I love this guy! He even took us to see Platform 9 3/4, Kings cross.) and Liam who is super tall (making us look even shorter than our original heights) and he took us to the parliament. We also met Derek who made us come up with an objective of what we should do next, and was of great help in making us learn about the challenges we would face and was a great inspiration. On our free day, Lisa also from BYC were with us and she was absolutely brilliant. I love how passionate she was about her area of child protection and she spent the entire day with us. One of the things that made me respect her even more is that when we entered this Muslim award funstion that we were invited to, she put on her scarf to cover her hair. The respect she showed there was inspiring.

 

Harriet from the Parliament house was just sweet and she was there for the two days we visited the parliament. I was lucky to get the chance to shadow the work of a House of Commons memeber and I got John Glen, whose constituency was Salisbury, the same town that our former president Nasheed studied in. He and his assistant Stuart was more than welcoming and spent the entire time with me. We discussed about the political environment in Maldives, about John's work and his constiuency, the proceedings of HoC, and how he reaches to the people in Salisbury. Stuart was friendly and took me to lunch with his friends who were an amzing bunch of pretty people. He even took me to see the queen, who we saw from a distance as she entered the HoC to give her address.

The young and fun people from Refugee Youth; Blake, Paul from England, Frederico, Sian, Abera, Hinda and all the rest were really friendly and we played so many games with them. Each of them had a cause that they supported and they cooked us an Indian dinner, which was delicious. These people inspired me so much to create something that would last a long time and involve lots of people.

 

Saad and Aishah from Young Muslims Advisory Group (YMAG) were too kind. They spent two days with us, and introduced us to many people. They ven hosted a social for us where we met Fran from debatemate, a very enthusiastic guys named Mohamed who was extremely sweet and had lots to ask us, Jasmine and Rukiah from Love Life generation whose spirit and determination was something I wish I had. Khadijah from the Ilford youth centre was inpiring with her girls team and how they got together to learn new things like gardening. 

The little kids we met from the school we went were excellent. They were hardly thirteen but they carried out a very well researched and interesting debate on Syria and I was stunned at how informative they were. 

We also met several other people who were all very friendly and people that I hope to keep in touch with. I am glad to have met them and learned about their work. All these people inspire me to become a better person, and to be the change.  

PS, All pics from Nawaf's facebook page. They were all taken by Nawaf and I don't own any of them.