This week we had a visit from the Great Western Air Ambulance Charity (GWAAC). A volunteer speaker, Richard, came to the hall and set up his projector and banner while we played a quick version of The Chair Game to keep the girls occupied. Once they had finished, we sat them on chairs in a row in front of the screen and introduced Richard.
Richard then gave a half an hour talk about what GWAAC do and what area they cover. He explained that they cover 6 counties across the South West of England, with a population of about 2.1 million but that they recieve no government funding (including the National Lottery) even though they need about £3million a year to operate. He talked about the equipment on the helicopter and that they can perform minor surgical procedures on board. He also talked about the amount of space the helicopter needs to land in (20m square, about the size of our meeting hall!) and the fact that they fly to various hospitals in the area, including Bristol's BRI where the helipad is on top of a tall building. He showed a couple of videos of the helicopter landing in different places.
Once he had finished his talk, he handed out a quiz and wordsearch for the girls to do. We let them work on them for a bit with a break for a drink and biscuit in the middle. We had to do a bit of explaining for some of the questions as they were not really worded in a child-friendly way but once we had explained the girls could usually remember the answers from the talk. I did have one girl say that there were only 6 people living in the area that they cover though!
We then told them the answers to the quiz and had time for a few questions. We had some sensible ones like "have you ever been in the helicopter?" ("no, only really sick people get to go in the helicopter"), and "how long have you worked for GWAAC?" ("2 years as a volunteer speaker") but then we got a few more obscure questions like "have you ever had to do an amputation on the helicopter?" ("yes, very rarely") and "can you do organ transplants on the helicopter?" ("no, but we can do blood transfusions").
During the course of the quiz and question/answer session, we had one girl lose 2 of her teeth so we wrapped them up in paper ready to give to her mum at the end! While I've dealt with many lost teeth, I'm not sure I've ever had a girl lose two teeth in one meeting before!
Once the girls had exhausted their questions, Richard handed out a colouring sheet and a GWAAC pencil to each girl (we had to pay for the pencils but did it from unit funds). We then played a game of Splat to fill the remaining time before handing out some adventure books to the girls who made their promise last meeting, and some Science Investigator badges to the girls who had earnt it from last term.
This week was a nice and simple one from a leaders perspective, we got to sit and listen to the talk and only had to organise a few games to fill a bit of time. The girls also seemed to be fairly interested in the talk and actually remembered a lot of it for the quiz. I think it helped that it was something they are unlikely to learn about anywhere else so they found it interesting.
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