SI Winchester members had a packed day this year and we started off the morning with a zoom with our Friendship Links of SI Kisumu in Kenya and SI Grange over Sands in Cumbria. Both clubs had prepared a presentation of recent events with Kisumu concentrating on girls’ education, health and mentoring. Grange gave an excellent presentation of their recent Orange Campaign where they were well supported by Cartmel Priory and other institutions. I think we need to learn from their expertise!
Not to be outdone SI Winchester has put together a similar presentation of our work and you can view this here.
Next up was the Ladies lunch at Winchester rugby club where we recently sponsored the U18s girls’ rugby team with coats for their touchline team members. The lunch charity this year was Home Start, but given there were over 100 attendees this gave us an opportunity to be visible and create awareness of the club. Six members attended and there was much discussion around the table of Soroptimism. The guest speaker was Sue Dorrington, a member of the Women’s Rugby GB team who played in the 1991 Womens rugby World Cup which took place in Wales. Much like the womens football at this time, the International Rugby Board didn’t recognise them and no-one spoke about it after they came back, despite GB coming second out of 12 teams after the USA. It was 2009 when the IRB finally recognised this as a tournament in its own right. This year the Womens World Cup is being held in the UK.
Sue lives in Hampshire and she is still passionate about rugby, playing her last game only a few years ago at the age of 60. Learning that we were sponsoring locally and that we were present, she had already googled us and was very keen to talk to us. She was a lovely lady and happy to be in our photo/ We hope very much she will keep in touch as our relationship with Winchester girls and ladies evolves.
Finally we spent the evening at the theatre with Kate Mosse CBE, co-founder in 1996 of the annual Award for Women’s Fiction. Her first novel The Labyrinth took 10 years to complete and came out in 2005. She is a superb storyteller and her stories of how she came to write her novel and the historic research she went through and presented were compelling and really brought the words to life. We weren’t all aware of the TV mini series of the book which was filmed in France and South Africa, but she had thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being on set.
Given the strength of women’s actions on this day it was a day well spent.