Wow I've really been slacking on keeping up-to-date on my own blog! Well I'm sure there's much more important stuff to be pondered about. Anyway,
Australia's been good to me. I'm down to 25 days or so left until I arrive back in MN, and it is 18 days until we go to NZ. I'm really missing home but I'm not "checked out" in my mind--I'm trying to keep it that way so I can experience as much as I can while I'm here. I'm starting to make a small list of things I have yet to do...I've done so much already! :)
For example this past Sunday I went on a (free) tour of the Sydney Opera House! It was really fun. We got to see places like the changing rooms and practice studios that people don't normally see. It was a self-guided tour. My favorite part was watching some acrobats perform in the Studio. Afterwards we wandered and found our way to the restaurant Pancakes on the Rocks. No, this does not mean pancakes with ice. I've been to this place before but it is very good. Later my friend Tricia and I walked around the city until we wandered to Darling Harbour. We ate at a Chinese restaurant called Chinta Ria. It was very good...but we were still full from pancakes! So we had to take it to go....haha
So, I've only got a few weeks left! In class today we're discussing what to do with all that we've learned. It's crazy talk! But it opened it up for a great discussion involving all of the readings and experiences we've all been doing.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Stressful Based Camping Bland Ministry Lousy Field Experience
So, Adventure Based Camping Ministry Field Experience (as it should NOT be called) ended this past Friday. It was one of the most difficult experiences I have ever had. There was so much going on and bad communication was everywhere. However bad this experience was I'm going to try to just lay out the facts instead of winging (wining) about everything I could.
We arrived at the camp on Tuesday night. Now, I don't know how they assumed everything would be alright to have a few students leave the school during a regular school week with classes going still on. As maybe you don't know, Tuesday is my busiest day of the week: I have The View from Australia in the morning from 8:45-12, Faith and the Contemporary Artist from 2-4pm, and Video Production from 6-9pm. Then, right after that, I was on my way to Vision Valley, where the camp is held.
Tiffany, Andrew and I had to catch a bus from Drummoyne, where school is, to Burwood train station. From there we got on a train to Epping and had to get off and switch rails to continue all the way up to Hornsby. (Look it up on the Sydney City Rail network if you're interested). We then took a taxi to the camp. We got there about 11pm, maybe later. Granted, all of that went relatively smoothly...it was after a very long day. And we were all supposed to be ready for the kids to arrive in the morning.
Wednesday morning, the first day of the camp, came as a surprise. I'm not sure how ready we were for a normal camp, let alone the camp we were about to lead. A few campers came early and we did not have enough time to go over some paperwork. This camp was for about 23 primary school age kids (school years 4-6, aged 8-12) and most of them came because they were sponsored.
A few of them came early. This meant we didn't have time to go over some paperwork just before they came and we had to push that till later. So as more started arriving Andrew and I were sent to play with the ones that had been registered to keep them busy until all of them had arrived. We were given some balls and sent to the green lawn. One kid grabbed a football-on-a-tail thing and a few other kids grabbed whatever else we were given. Soon, of course, it got out of hand and we couldn't control them. As they were all sent to us we headed to where we made name tags. Soon after this, we went back to the lawn and arranged ourselves in a circle to learn each others' names. We passed a ball around and whoever had the ball said their name and if they had a choice which veggie they would be. Somehow we didn't get rid of the other balls and some kids wandered off. Some wrestled. Some just started chatting to themselves. Obviously cooperation, respect, and listening were not characteristics of this group.
We had some time to get to know the leaders and the staff of Vision Valley. Then, after morning tea we went to do some rock climbing. After that we had lunch, then archery, dinner, watched a movie, and had supper. Way later we got to bed. First day in a nutshell.
Second day: wake up, breakfast, input time, morning tea, canoeing, waterslide, lunch, messy games, free time/showers, dinner,
Final day. wake up, breakfast, input time, morning tea, waterslide, lunch, fill out paperwork, go home.
The waterslide was definitely the highlight for this camp. Everyone seemed to cooperate and most importantly have fun. It was even more fun when two people went at the same time because they went faster. I heard that canoeing was pretty fun too, but at the time I was resting. Archery was fun, but it was not very exciting because everyone only had two arrows to shoot and not everyone got the hang of it and actually hit the target. Then you had to wait till everyone was done shooting until you could retrieve your arrows. This meant that even if you misfired your arrow and it landed just a few feet in front of you, you could not cross the line to retrieve it. Rock climbing was the worst, but not totally bad. Lots of kids made it to the top and overcame some fears going up high and abseiling. Although, it was hard to deal with the kids who were not climbing. They kept running around, left their beleying post, and repeatedly disobeyed the leaders keeping everyone behind the climbing line or close to the group. I was about to climb but the leader said that we had to cut it short because kids would not behave. I could live with that. O and messy games were a blast. The kids definitely know how to get yucky! We had a few different games involving bananas, eggs, pancake batter, shaving cream, and canned tomatoes. At the end we were hosed off, and the water was freezing!
All in all the activities were ok. The hardest part was keeping them under control when we did not have an activity and to seperate kids from fighting...which happened a lot with the boys. And I'm not talking about just wrestling, sometimes these kids would lash out at each other. We had to physically seperate them, which is not looked greatly upon in Australia--leaders are rarely allowed to interfere with campers' actions because of some laws that keep kids safe from leaders. Several times we had to really calm them down, by which I mean a sonic boom. (Side note, it was actually kinda funny how our leader Jerry said "oy" really really loud sometimes, because he's an Aussie). Now the really upsetting news: in total, 6 kids left or had to leave the camp. None of us would say we wished they would leave but all of us knew that this camp would not survive if they stayed. They would just not cooperate. There were tons of name calling, unheard of amounts of swearing (coming from these little mouths!), and door slamming.
There were some good moments:
One of the boys, Damien, probably wasn't ready for this camp. He's a great kid and did really well on archery and rock climbing. But at the end of the day he really missed his mom and wanted nothing more than to be back home with her. He eventually left and everyone encouraged and loved on him. While he was having a rough first night away from mom the other boys rearranged their beds so they would be closer to him.
After some troublesome kids had left we all got a break. There were still a few feuds but they were way lower grade. We could actually talk to kids not even about anything interesting, but meals thereafter were a lot easier.
The girls had a good time. They were nowhere near the frustration as the boys (considering there were about 5 or 6 of them and about 15 boys). Still, they were sometimes bratty and a little weird. And another good point: I think that the boys behaved themselves and only harrassed one another and did not bring any trouble to the girls!
I've already covered a lot. There's so much that happened. I'm actually scarred and I know that I don't want to work with or see a kid that old for a while...I just can't handle the immaturity. But it also taught me a lot about myself. I thought I could handle them but looking back I did not really talk to them at their own level. I just hope that I wasn't seen as a meanie but that Jesus shown through me somehow.
We arrived at the camp on Tuesday night. Now, I don't know how they assumed everything would be alright to have a few students leave the school during a regular school week with classes going still on. As maybe you don't know, Tuesday is my busiest day of the week: I have The View from Australia in the morning from 8:45-12, Faith and the Contemporary Artist from 2-4pm, and Video Production from 6-9pm. Then, right after that, I was on my way to Vision Valley, where the camp is held.
Tiffany, Andrew and I had to catch a bus from Drummoyne, where school is, to Burwood train station. From there we got on a train to Epping and had to get off and switch rails to continue all the way up to Hornsby. (Look it up on the Sydney City Rail network if you're interested). We then took a taxi to the camp. We got there about 11pm, maybe later. Granted, all of that went relatively smoothly...it was after a very long day. And we were all supposed to be ready for the kids to arrive in the morning.
Wednesday morning, the first day of the camp, came as a surprise. I'm not sure how ready we were for a normal camp, let alone the camp we were about to lead. A few campers came early and we did not have enough time to go over some paperwork. This camp was for about 23 primary school age kids (school years 4-6, aged 8-12) and most of them came because they were sponsored.
A few of them came early. This meant we didn't have time to go over some paperwork just before they came and we had to push that till later. So as more started arriving Andrew and I were sent to play with the ones that had been registered to keep them busy until all of them had arrived. We were given some balls and sent to the green lawn. One kid grabbed a football-on-a-tail thing and a few other kids grabbed whatever else we were given. Soon, of course, it got out of hand and we couldn't control them. As they were all sent to us we headed to where we made name tags. Soon after this, we went back to the lawn and arranged ourselves in a circle to learn each others' names. We passed a ball around and whoever had the ball said their name and if they had a choice which veggie they would be. Somehow we didn't get rid of the other balls and some kids wandered off. Some wrestled. Some just started chatting to themselves. Obviously cooperation, respect, and listening were not characteristics of this group.
We had some time to get to know the leaders and the staff of Vision Valley. Then, after morning tea we went to do some rock climbing. After that we had lunch, then archery, dinner, watched a movie, and had supper. Way later we got to bed. First day in a nutshell.
Second day: wake up, breakfast, input time, morning tea, canoeing, waterslide, lunch, messy games, free time/showers, dinner,
Final day. wake up, breakfast, input time, morning tea, waterslide, lunch, fill out paperwork, go home.
The waterslide was definitely the highlight for this camp. Everyone seemed to cooperate and most importantly have fun. It was even more fun when two people went at the same time because they went faster. I heard that canoeing was pretty fun too, but at the time I was resting. Archery was fun, but it was not very exciting because everyone only had two arrows to shoot and not everyone got the hang of it and actually hit the target. Then you had to wait till everyone was done shooting until you could retrieve your arrows. This meant that even if you misfired your arrow and it landed just a few feet in front of you, you could not cross the line to retrieve it. Rock climbing was the worst, but not totally bad. Lots of kids made it to the top and overcame some fears going up high and abseiling. Although, it was hard to deal with the kids who were not climbing. They kept running around, left their beleying post, and repeatedly disobeyed the leaders keeping everyone behind the climbing line or close to the group. I was about to climb but the leader said that we had to cut it short because kids would not behave. I could live with that. O and messy games were a blast. The kids definitely know how to get yucky! We had a few different games involving bananas, eggs, pancake batter, shaving cream, and canned tomatoes. At the end we were hosed off, and the water was freezing!
All in all the activities were ok. The hardest part was keeping them under control when we did not have an activity and to seperate kids from fighting...which happened a lot with the boys. And I'm not talking about just wrestling, sometimes these kids would lash out at each other. We had to physically seperate them, which is not looked greatly upon in Australia--leaders are rarely allowed to interfere with campers' actions because of some laws that keep kids safe from leaders. Several times we had to really calm them down, by which I mean a sonic boom. (Side note, it was actually kinda funny how our leader Jerry said "oy" really really loud sometimes, because he's an Aussie). Now the really upsetting news: in total, 6 kids left or had to leave the camp. None of us would say we wished they would leave but all of us knew that this camp would not survive if they stayed. They would just not cooperate. There were tons of name calling, unheard of amounts of swearing (coming from these little mouths!), and door slamming.
There were some good moments:
One of the boys, Damien, probably wasn't ready for this camp. He's a great kid and did really well on archery and rock climbing. But at the end of the day he really missed his mom and wanted nothing more than to be back home with her. He eventually left and everyone encouraged and loved on him. While he was having a rough first night away from mom the other boys rearranged their beds so they would be closer to him.
After some troublesome kids had left we all got a break. There were still a few feuds but they were way lower grade. We could actually talk to kids not even about anything interesting, but meals thereafter were a lot easier.
The girls had a good time. They were nowhere near the frustration as the boys (considering there were about 5 or 6 of them and about 15 boys). Still, they were sometimes bratty and a little weird. And another good point: I think that the boys behaved themselves and only harrassed one another and did not bring any trouble to the girls!
I've already covered a lot. There's so much that happened. I'm actually scarred and I know that I don't want to work with or see a kid that old for a while...I just can't handle the immaturity. But it also taught me a lot about myself. I thought I could handle them but looking back I did not really talk to them at their own level. I just hope that I wasn't seen as a meanie but that Jesus shown through me somehow.
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