Saturday 30th July 2022
As some of the workshops started from 9.30am onwards, we headed to the Arboretum earlier this morning. In the Physics Pavilion there was a Make Your Own Solar Charger workshop which I thought might be good to do, but despite getting there 35 minutes before it began, all the spaces had been filled!
Instead, we went to the World of Words tent, where a talk was scheduled at 10am with Emma Slade, a financial analyst who, after being held hostage at gunpoint on a business trip, decided to go into yoga and eventually becoming the first Western woman to become a fully ordained Buddhist nun in Bhutan. It was a very interesting talk!
We wandered around the area to see what else was going on, passing Laughter Yoga (which was actually really funny to see everyone laughing so much!). The next talk at 12 was about 40 years of WOMAD, with some of the founders and directors of WOMAD from various years, including Peter Gabriel, Steve Haddrell, and Chris Smith. It was fascinating to hear some of the stories from the first few years of the festival, where it didn’t always go smoothly!
Once this talk had finished, we got some food and watched some of the poetry focused on climate change. I went along to watch some of a film titled ‘Hostile’, about the UK and its migrant communities, although missed the first half of the film so will try to watch it somehow.
By 7pm, we were beginning to get ready for our night shift, which started at 7.45pm. We were based around the Open Air Stage and the Siam stage, and had to watch out for any issues and rotate between the stages at the same time as a performance was on. We were lucky to be in this location, as it meant we could listen to the music whilst we were working. However, I found this shift rather stressful, as one of the jobs was to tell people to stop standing on the flag poles and bins due to an injury at a previous festival. Not a fun job when The Flaming Lips were playing and it was a great view for children! But most of the time, everyone was very understanding and did not mind, which was a relief!
The night shift got quieter after about midnight, but still some amazing performances on in the Siam stage including dancers and a popular band. We were pleased to sit down during our half an hour break. We had to take some belongings to lost property so it was nice to see another area of the arena and where the busy areas were around 2am!
Our shift finished in a slightly unusual way - a problem with the water supply supplying the taps in one area of the main arena meant that water was leaking everywhere! Mum got soaked trying to stop the water from gushing out. After we had spent some time trying to figure out how to fix it with another volunteer, who had also radioed for assistance, an engineer turned up, bent the pipe, put a cable tie on it and it was temporarily fixed! Wish we had known to do that!! However, on the plus side, as Mum’s clothes were soaking, we got to finish our shift slightly early.
Feeling very tired, we slept well and were looking forward to a full day ahead of enjoying the festival, as no shifts until Monday at 6.45am.
No comments:
Post a Comment