I was already dreading this particular camp as it loomed; with most normal camps having numbers between 15-70 people, and usually going for at most 3 days (Fri night - Sunday arvo), this was always going to be a ball buster
The NACCW, or the National Associationa of Child Care Workers, camp came up with 150 people, from Fri MORNING - MONDAY arvo, and we were allocated the number of staff that would normally run a camp of 100 :(
And because the fires had wiped a cabin out, the staff were short of beds and a few of us had to scrounge for a different berth of some sort each night
After a late night on Thurs, the camp staff and I departed for L'Abri at 7:30am, and spent the entire day preparing the site and working with the campers as they arrived from all over the country, representatives from each of the 9 provinces AND visiters from the USA
We were only able to finally hit the sack @ 12 that night (after we'd found spare berths (for that night only)), only to have to get up again @ 4am to start preparing for Saturday morning breakfast, and this sleeping pattern persisted for the entire camp :(
Needless to say, the staff scrambled for hourly naps at every spare moment!
As hard as it was, there were many brilliant moments of the camp; the big field games they ran were fun, incredibly colourful and musical
They brought up with them a collection of at least 15 Jambees (dunno how to spell it, those African drums?), and every night around the camp fire there was African drumming (in South Africa! Now that's pretty cool :P) and dancing kids; incredibly festive
And on Sunday night, they each presented a cultural item from each of the provinces, complete with elaborate and decorative traditional costume, the delegates from the USA even did some rap for us, and some pretty cool 'stepping' (which apparently is some Southern thing)
Came out of it pretty proud of making it through such a gruelling schedule, and feeling blessed to have been able to experience a snapshot of the different cultures in South Africa
Needless to say, I slept damn well Monday night back @ the YDC :S
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2 comments:
4am makes me wanna die...I'm way too weak for it.
Hey Nate,
Nice blog man, it's good to see that there are still some nice stuff out there put together by real people.
I saw this post while working on something for a client and thought i may pitch the idea of linking you in at NACCW.org.za which i am busy reworking now.
Do you spend a lot of time on the ground with this kind of stuff?
Regards
Bronson.
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