Hugh and Karl were matched through Chapter2 in 2023. This pairing finds the joy in simple things like birdwatching, bike rides and baking. Hugh describes Karl as an “energetic butterfly”, so being paired with an older mentor means that Karl receives the wisdom on Hugh’s experiences while keeping Hugh on his toes. Sometimes the most unlikely of matches can form the strongest bonds.

Transcript

So, my name is uh Hugh Rogers and I’ve been with Chapter 2 for just under two years.

Meeting Carl was quite interesting for the first time. He was quite subdued, but it didn’t take him long to show his true colors. A energetic butterfly because he just flits from one thing to the other. He’s got infinite energy. Keeps me on my toes.

So, I’m a bird watcher. And when I first knew him, he didn’t know the names of any birds. In fact, he was scared of geese. He used to run a mile. And And now he’s getting there. Um, he even sounds as if he might enjoy it.

Yeah. The cut is over there just in front of that tree. You see that white dot?

But the guarantee with the butterfly is that the interest will last 10 minutes and then you’ll be on to the next thing.

I think one of the things that chapter 2 pick out early on is that a lot of the people that we’re interacting with have been let down and therefore I made it a number one priority to be as consistent as I possibly could. So we meet once a week on a Tuesday after school and I’ve not missed one yet.

Something that I like doing and and he likes doing is cooking. So, we’ve done, you know, lasagna and shepherd’s pie. His favorite, of course, is chocolate chip cookies, but that’s hardly surprising.

Keep one hand holding it and the other one just taps it like that.

Whether mentoring is making any difference to him in his outlook is really difficult to assess, but he is more comfortable walking around in places where he’s going to meet people from school who give him a hard time, and and he’s more aware about how his behaviour will affect other people and how he should respond to the bullying that he gets at school.

So, I decided quite early on that I needed to um share my own experiences of of bullying, which I did, and the mechanisms that I used to overcome that. And I think he’s starting to find his own ways of doing that, which will hopefully mean that he gets reduced detentions at school if nothing else.

Carl’s a really interesting person. He’s really bright. He’s quite understanding and generous, which is surprising in many ways given his experiences at school.

And I just wish that we could get him to a place where he could be sufficiently confident that he could just blossom into I think quite an impressive young man.

So without glasses you pull those out then then that makes your eyes the right distance. So you’re looking at it as if you had glasses.

Honestly, when you start this whole process, you hope that you’re going to make a dramatic difference immediately. And I think you need to dampen that expectation down. The reality is that the change is very gradual, if it’s there at all. But for me, you’ve got to be prepared to put in that regular thing in the hope that it’s going to make a difference.

So I’m often reminded of something that my mother used to say to me, which was if you can change one person, that’s enough.

So that’s what we’re trying to do.