30 foot walls, stones, and bricks = Belfast "fun."

Ok, so it's not fun for youth workers, neighbors and young people who just want to get home safely, but apparently, for a lot of the young people we work with, it's all the rage. The past few nights have seen yp hanging out at the "peace line", waiting for yp to show up on the other side, and even calling each other on their mobiles to set up a confrontation. The frustration is that these really are good kids, young people looking for some excitement and this is what they've seen. Two years ago it was their older brothers, so now it's their turn, right? I think successful community work in Belfast should consist of exporting all of the stones, bricks and anything else detachable...

Meanwhile, I spent the past two days confirming my lack of desire to continue on in social work education. It was a roomful of social workers (there are reason for someone only working with one social worker at a time!) discussing, rehashing, arguing over the best course of action for working with hypothetical young people engaging in risk taking behavior. I don't enjoy pulling apart case studies, I don't like arguing theories, and I don't like attempting to work on these things with 15 social workers who think they know it all that because of their degrees. Actually, we could all use a bit of humility and realization of our ignorance, I think. In NI there's this unspoken (but sometimes spoken, too) rift between youth workers and social workers. The social workers think they're better qualified, the youth workers think social workers don't have a clue as to how to work with yp and that they work in terms that are too formal and stuffy. And then, everyone gets on the mental health workers and how inefficient and unreachable they are. Come on now, folks, we're all working toward the same goals and everyone in this field is overworked and underpaid. Why can't we all just get along? (Or maybe we should all just have it out at the peace wall with stones...)

Camping this weekend with (most) fellow NI BVSers. Glad to get out of dodge.