Yu Jia's Reflection

This year’s training camp seemed different from last year’s, I thought so, because there was not as many punishments and we could keep to the time for most of the activities, so it did not seem that we had to rush through much thing, in fact, my patrol could still manage to get some rest while keeping to the time limit of some activities, and I did wonder if we did too little things.

My patrol was the first one, O-rangers! From making of the proposal to the painting of the flags to the camp, I learnt pretty much stuffs, practically because I did not do as much last year. I finally realized why I was so irritating in the camp last year, because I finally found out how the seniors felt back then…

It was a bit stressful at first because many people did not follow Ajeeta and my instructions to think of ideas for the proposals and stuffs, and when doing work, they did not do much as well. However, everything still turned out fine (:

Cheers had many changes on the way to camp site as well as in the camp for my patrol and it was fun :D Reaching the campsite and moving all the equipments to Pax Lodge, we started with tent-pitching which confused most of us. The pioneer training from 3 weeks ago somehow faded slightly from my memory and we did many things wrongly. Things also turned out a bit confusing since we did not follow the duty allocations that we did because Cynthia was not here for tent pitching since she was the QM and she was making the kitchen shelter. It felt so good when we realized that our tent did not have as much problem as we thought, except that the groundsheet was still underneath. :/

Gadget making was ok except that we did not have the wooden mallet and we had to be extremely careful with the metal one. Some of the gadgets also did not follow measurements and alignments of the gadgets well so we had to redo a bit of them. It was also frustrating because there were not enough of the 48 inch poles and we had to substitute it with the 36 inch poles. We had to make many trips to the canoe shed to change the poles here and there. Knots and lashings were also confusing because some of them were unsure of how to make the knots or lashes. However, there was still time for changes to be made, except that our gadgets did not seem straight…

Lunch was nice but Yun Jin’s phobia of Styrofoam boxes was not gone yet and it was funny! Our duty for the first day was cooks, and we helped out with the dinner. We did not cook the dinner but we helped with the preparations like cutting and marinating the chicken, cutting the lettuce and more. Cooking was done by O3. Games was nice for that day because the flour thing to was quite fun :D My patrol was quite unlucky for the cup game because the cups kept falling and we had to redo over and over again, and we ended up taking the small container which made it hard for us to take out the gummies since our head could not fit into the container to take the gummies our properly. But I wanted more flour! The soccer game was nice too because we blowed the ping pong ball here and there and eventually also blowed the flour to others’ faces as a result. After that was the game whereby we had to pass bread and made sandwiches by passing bread from our nose, neck, forehead, stomach and cheeks. The sandwich dropped on the floor a lot of times and the sec 2s did not really dare to pass, but we succeeded eventually! The part where we passed our bread was frustrating because we wanted to pass on a large piece of bread but it turned out too small in the end :D The water bomb game whereby we had to throw water bombs without using our hands to our patrol member in front which caught the water bombs with their ponchos for that day was nice too. All our feet were wet but none of us really minded it much since we had a lot of fun for that. My poncho tore from the first day when it was accidentally stepped on and accidentally torn while running from one destination to the other. The dinner was nice too although the carrot was hard. The drink turned out to be dye and I guess a lot of us were shocked because we drank finish the whole cup of dyed water (:

COH after that was ok. Everyone said around the same things though and it was fun…Night game was not as scary as I thought, but Charlene still cried…There were many clues that my patrol did not manage to catch because we were not observant enough and because a few of my patrol members were busy trying to comfort Charlene and the rest of us to look at the clues. We had to force some of our patrol members to eat the supper after that before they went to sleep when they did not want to eat…We laid the newspapers and groundsheets and I was quite frustrated because many of them were standing outside the tent doing nothing when they could have came in to help, but the whole thing could still be managed…

We woke up at 6 the next day and cleared our newspapers and groundsheets. There were no problems for that, however we were still late for the PT in the end…PT was to run outside the campsite after warming up. While running, we had to sing songs and it was so tiring! After that was colours when Pei Xuan, Yun Jin and I were the colours party for the first time since I thought we will be able to learn something if we tried it out. After that was breakfast and my patrol had a lot of troubles for the breakfast because of the pot stand and the cups and so because there were a lot of ants and we had to re-wash them. The seat upon also took a long time to be set up…After breakfast was the white-racing where we had to collect 14 clues as we went from station to station. We mixed the stations up and it also took us a long time to realize that Nafeeshah was the clue, but we did not get the clue from her in the end since we did not do anything for them.

After that was outdoor cooking. I was supposed to do fire at first but it was changed because I was surer with the menu that we were cooking since logistics was done by me. It was confusing for me since I was the only one doing the food preparations as Charlene prepared the chicken. The part where we had to take the items that we shared was confusing. The rain totally spoilt the outdoor cooking! ): We had to move into “indoor cooking” and everyone prepared the food together while we sent the food over to the YAs and Hui Xin ma’am to cook. Our patrol was the first to send the chicken and it was very yummy :D We did not manage to finish all our food in the end since we were all too full. There was also much confusion here and there in my patrol then.

The first aid game was ok but since only Jerrica went for the first aid course and we all knew nothing about all the first aid things, we could all only stone there and listen and learn from those scenarios. It was nice since we learnt new first aid knowledge!

The part where we had to entertain the seniors were hard since my patrol had no idea on what to do and we eventually settled on imitations. The extra two person (Cynthia and me) could only imitate each of us. It was quite frustrating because Charlene and Bi Xia did not dare to imitate the seniors who did the funny funny actions. From this game, we got to use garbage bag for our water bomb game. Water bomb game was scary since I lost my water bomb before the start of the game to Ajeeta and I had to run frantically around because I had no water bomb to attack anyone. After that, we went to have a wash up and changed to our camp tee! :D It was dinner after that and campfire! Campfire was great and we screamed and we went all so hyper. Ajeeta presumed again that we would get hyper after going to the washroom and the whole patrol went to the washroom :D Our performance was ok and other patrols’ performances were great too! The emcees were funny too (: After the campfire was the few games where we all had so much fun laughing and laughing non-stop. :D

We then laid the newspapers and groundsheets where the same scenario as the day before happened again…

We slept immediately since we knew that there was sentry duty. We woke for sentry duty at 2am. Bi Xia and I were the first two to walk around for the sentry duty since I went back to close the tent doors and we two took our torchlights and were the last 2. It was only after returning back did I realize that it was also a mini session of the things we felt about our patrol members. I did not like it much since there were many people there and it did not feel comfortable for me to say out a lot of things that were in my mind. Thus it did not turn out fine for me…

Early in the morning was to clear our garbage and put our groundsheet to dry. Ajeeta and I pushed the trolley to take the newspapers out to the main gate and were late for the reporting time. However, patrol 2 and 3 overslept. We did punishments after the 40 squats that we did in the first day that were invalid. We did squats and jumping jacks and had breakfast in the end. Breakfast was very filling because we ate a lot as there were a lot of rounds of fried rice and fried rice and fried rice. We carried out our duties and took out our gadget poles and it was hard for my patrol because just the taking out of gadgets in the kitchen shelter already took us the whole time we could use for carrying out our duties and taking out our gadget poles. Thus, we were late and seniors were angry, and gave us yet another 15 minutes which proved not to be enough for us as well while we cleaned the gadget poles and put them to dry and so. After separating the gadget poles as A.guides ones and canoe shed ones, we wrote our good points, hopes and wishes and put them into the balloons. I did not know what I could write, so I only wrote hopes that I wish for, not writing those that I wanted to achieve from the camp since I achieved them (such as completing the night game without crying much!). We revealed our manitos in the end, and I was right for the guess of my manito :D

The prize giving part was funny. Although my patrol was the “most efficient” one, I thought we could have worked harder because I thought my patrol members were rather slow in performing certain tasks. They took their time for many of the activities that made me anxious and impatient because I was worried that we would get scolded. We packed our things in front of Olave Hall and packed them on the bus and went home. Many of us slept on the bus!

Overall, I thought my patrol was ok, although I was quite unhappy with many things that we did, but my patrol was very fun! My patrol members could get along very well and they did most of the things that they were assigned to do. Since we could all work quite well, we did not have much problems, though there were still some. I miss my patrol now after the camp! ): -

yujia
O-RANGERS (: