This week brought a new energy to the organization, with a group of students from UNC Chapel Hill in Belfast as part of a study abroad program coming in to volunteer for one of the workshops. I got to help out with the training program they went through, which was a nice full-circle moment given that I had sat in that exact same session on my very first day.

Wednesday's workshop turned out to be a landmark one. Because so many volunteers were available, it was the first time in Fighting Words NI's history that each child could be paired with their own dedicated mentor. When the class broke out into tables to work on the second chapter of their stories individually, I had the privilege of giving my full, undivided attention to one child—a girl named Avery.

During the collaborative writing portion of the session, Avery had been quite reserved. But the moment we sat down together and I asked her a few questions about where she wanted to take the story, something shifted. She told me she wanted to write one of her own, and almost immediately, pen was put to paper. It was one of those moments that quietly teaches you something. I realized fairly quickly that the best thing I could do was step back and let her go. Asking questions or offering prompts while she was mid-flow would only have interrupted it. Sometimes, in mentoring, less really is more.

Later in the session, I was given the role of offering feedback as children from each table came up to read their stories aloud to the class. It was a genuinely moving experience—being even a small part of encouraging that kind of confidence and creative courage in a child is hard to put into words, but it's exactly the kind of moment that makes this placement feel worthwhile.