Finglas South

Thursday was fairly quite during the first part of my day at placement. I mostly worked on finishing the first draft of my work plan and worked a bit more on setting up my blog site to get it up and running. My work plan is coming along; it is just goals that I’m going to try and complete during my placement. I often get kinda stuck on details when I'm working on a project like this for some reason, trying to word it just right or make it fit in how it would make sense to me. Because of this I feel like it has been taking me a while to finish it off. But I am excited about it! I am excited because the goals I have decided to set up for myself, while challenging (due to time frame and pushing myself a bit), are very manageable and will help me leave my placement with a ton of information and, hopefully, new skills.
Working on my blog was enjoyable mostly because I go to work more on the details of the site then the writing. Designing the site gave me the opportunity to have fun and be creative with it. In any project getting to be creative it the part I end up spending the most enjoyable amount of time doing. Content is not as fun all the time but very important; thus I continue to write. The blog is a challenge for me because it's not something I’m completely comfortable doing. I do like to journal and write on my own because I find a great way to express myself, play with ideas, explore thoughts, and a way to track ideas, how they change during a time of massive learning (such as this). But what I am not as comfortable with is putting them out there for the world to see. Once something is written in an open forum it is there.. to be judged and torn apart.. but hopefully nothing I have to say is that interesting or that controversial. It's coming along.. well, as you may someday see since you are reading this.
More conversation about the program and more reading filled most of my earlier afternoon. Again lots of tea and good conversation in the office. Not too many youth coming in, but some as it was the deadline day for some funding grants and school applications. I think yesterday I was getting a bit frustrated and worried that maybe it was always going to be this slow in the Centre, I think largely because people keep asking me what is going on with my placement and at times it has felt like I didn't had much to say. As well, I think the first part of yesterday might have influenced that as well, by at times just not feeling like I knew where I belong. Today I think I am able to fit the piece of how things are working in the centre together a bit more. I do for sure understand that things are going to pick up and that it just part of the transition period between programs. At times it just hard not to let the pressure of so little time and wanting to take in so much get to me a bit.

In the evening I went out with the detached Team, this time with Mick and Derek. I had spoke with Michael, the program manager, in the morning and he stated that if home visits came up in the future there was no issue with me going if I wanted to which I was very excited about. Mick and Derek are both so wonderful though, and great at giving me information on the community and young people they work with. The night again was pretty slow with no major interactions with young people but I still was able to learn a great deal from just walking and getting to know the area and having good conversation. Finglas, part of Dublin 11, is a suburb of Dublin north of the city centre. It s made up of Finglas South, Finglas East, and Finglas West. As of right now there isn’t much of a north created. Finglas South is the area that the Den is in and is the area that FAN, Detached, and Educations Projects are funded to work with although workers in all of the programs have told me they would not work with a youth if they asked for assistance from another area in Finglas. Derek and Mick also explained how within Finglas the areas of East, West, and South did not get much cross over from the locals. If you lived in one area you would not go into the other or really even associate with other people from other parts of Finglas in the most extreme cases. In Finglas South some of the major issues would be substance abuse, family break down, lack of community supports, high unemployment, low graduation rates from secondary schools and post secondary schools. Of course this is not the case for the entire population in Finglas South but the numbers are higher in the area. As well, understanding how small the area is and how many people actually live in it is important as well. 

When Detached goes out in the evening they are able to cover basically all of Finglas south, so that shows that the area is not that big compared to how spread out an area of a suburb might be in Canada (which Finglas might be looked at as). As well in this small area there are 10,000 people living there. That is like having the whole population of Lacombe, a small town I grew up in in Alberta, in a much smaller area. The entire population of Finglas is 31, 529 people (about 12,000 in Finglas South alone), living in an entire area of 7.01 km2. The entire population of Lacombe is 11, 707, living in an entire area of 20.89 km2. This hopefully will help give you a better idea of what I'm talking about.

During the walk it started to rain a bit giving me a bit more of the true Irish weather, since I have been very lucky to have had fantastic weather since I arrived which I have been told many times in very different from how their summer has been. As we were walking there was this HUGE rainbow. It was really beautiful.. so I took a picture I think I'm going to put up.. but hopefully as well gives more of a look into the area the Detached Team does their work. The guys set up a couple of different meetings with people to come into the centre to get help to apply for jobs and talk about helping them find out ways to complete their probation hours. We talked with a few different people before the night was done and the guys made sure I got home OK before leaving me for the evening.