Day 5: Rainy Day, Amazing Night

Day five was the first day of rain and cold weather. The third project started, and luckily I had some free time off while the students had group education on Teamwork and Communication. I had done laundry the day before, and although most of my stuff had dried the same day, I left some stuff overnight outside and it was damp once again. Laundry is such a pain in the butt. I have to do it every 2-3 days because if I don’t I end up with a pile of socks and underwear and t-shirts that could take me hours to wash in the sink. I take my clothes to the bathroom, with the magic soap bar, and dip the clothes in the water and rub the soap on them. I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I kind of just squeeze the clothes and make the water bubble and then drain it and rinse the clothes and wring them out. It’s quite primitive and I feel very rural whenever I have to do laundry.
The third project was going very well. During the afternoon break, our planned water fight was clearly not going to happen, and I think the entire camp went to sleep. They had more time to work on the project, and this is where my beloved Red Team encountered their first major problem. Jana has a problem with the team and doesn’t feel like she’s a part of the team. She feels that the team gravitates towards Marika whenever they have something to solve or ideas to decide. The rest of the group feels that Jane is missing for a lot of vital conversations, like when they brainstorm or are working on the project. She is constantly late. We tried to explain the need to communicate during the second part of the project, but at the end of the day, we realized the team was falling apart and something needed to be done.
For the night activity, Ekta and I created the Amazing Race Challenge. It was AWESOME! We set up eight stations:
1. Pucker Up: Each team has one stick of lipstick. One at a time, they need to put the lipstick on and kiss a poster and fill the space with kiss marks. The pictures were of an elephant’s butt, a pair of underwear, a pig’s face and other things. It was really funny.
2. Puzzle: Each team had to complete a puzzle of a starfish type thing. It was an easy challenge, so we’re going to change it.
3. Mint-Chopstick: Each team has to put a chopstick in their mouth and transfer, without using their hands, from one end to the other, a lifesaver mint. The first person has to get the mint out of the bucket with the chopstick and they pass it one by one down the line. The challenge required three mints to be transferred. It was funny to watch them become flustered and frustrated with each other but eventually they got the hang of it and were able to complete the task.
4. Sponges: This task required the teams to transfer water from one bucket to a cup using sponges. Three people were near the bucket with water, the other two were near the cup. They ran in the middle, squished water out of the sponges and transferred it to the cup. Simple, but harder than it looks.
5. Watermelon Roadblock: For this task, the clue to the next task was hidden in a cube of watermelon. The problem was that we cut up three watermelons, and there were at least 100+ cubes of watermelon to search through to find the clue. Blue team was first, then Green, and red and yellow were stuck rummaging through the watermelon to find the clue. Eventually I found the clue for the red team and you’ll never believe what happened. Next thing I know, I am being tackled by Frank (a tall guy on the yellow team) and everyone rushed over to dog pile on us. I was laughing so hard, and would not let go of the clue. Eventually, the red team helped me free and I gave them the clue and they were off. Jenny found the next clue for the yellow team soon after and the yellow team followed.
6. Balance beam: the team had to go one by one along a balance beam, which was actually the most challenging of the tasks. There was a problem with the rules when they were read and Jolin confused them by saying only one team can go at a time. It was supposed to be one person at a time, no matter what team, but everyone had to cross. There were some angry words exchanged, but eventually everyone made it past.
7. Human Statue: This task required the team to create a statue of something (ie horse) but we put requirements for what body parts can touch the floor (ie 2 legs, 2 hands, 1 butt, etc). Some teams did this easily, and others were stuck figuring out how to get four people to look like the object with certain body parts on or off the ground.
8. Word Scramble: This was the last leg of the race, but it wasn’t over yet. Each team had to run to the volleyball nets, one at a time, and retrieve bags of puzzle pieces. When they had all the bags, they could begin the puzzle which spelled out the clue to their next task. The clue read, “Go to the finish line.” Ekta and I didn’t realize until the task, just how many English words you can make with these 17 letters, but eventually they figured it out.
9. The finish line: The only clue we gave them to the finish line was, “Find the Jesus, a place where Catholics can pray at camp.” This was referring to the crucifix statue that was located in one of the far corners of camp. Some teams may have seen it during capture the flag, but most of the teams didn’t know where it was.
The blue team ended up winning the amazing race, followed by the green. The red and yellow were in a heated race for the finish line. The red team was ahead after the balance beam, because the yellow team couldn’t get over quickly. But the red team was held up by the puzzle and they finished barely before the yellow team. The best part was that neither red nor yellow knew where the finish line was exactly. The yellow team was very close to finding it, right at the corner of the building it was behind, but they turned away and in the end, the red team found the crucifix as the yellow team ran away from it! The Amazing Race was definitely the most epic night game of the camp and many of the students were quite irritated with the watermelon challenge (my idea). Actually, there were rumors that someone got sick and vomited during the wrestling match after eating so much watermelon, and although I didn’t see anything during clean up, I decided to wash the clothes I was wearing that night, just in case.

Day 4: I’m in the Mafia

Day four brought the end of the second project, and the university really enjoyed the work delivered by the students. I was really excited to see the bonding and teamwork that my team had and it was good to work on a project with my own team and not the blue team (although the blue team is my second favorite team now!). After each project was done, we take the leaders aside and give them feedback about how their doing as a leader. Sometimes we tell them that the need to work on incorporating the shyer students into the conversation, or they need to work on focusing on the goal, but we also don’t forget to tell them how great their doing—and they really are. For high school students, they all have great leadership skills even though this is their first time “leading” a team project.
The food, surprisingly, was also one of my favorite things too. I was always puzzled by my eating habits. I really enjoyed the food—goulash, Czech dumplings, and other Czech cuisine (which is my type of food—Meat & potatoes). I would always eat a lot for lunch and dinner (unless they were being stingy), but would always be hungry. Breakfast, which was always just bread, spread, ham (sometimes), jam and butter, was definitely the worst, just because I’m not a bread person. Even though I didn’t really like the breakfast, I would always eat a few rolls with jam and butter or meat and spread. It is funny to notice that all the Czech students put the butter, jam, etc on the outside of the rolls and all the internationals cut the bread open and put it on the inside. Cultural differences. Anyway, I couldn’t figure out why I was so hungry all the time, and it was just something we all had to deal with. I think that using my brain this much just requires much more calories than the typical day for me.
Day four had a casino night for the evening activity. I designed fake money for the night and we all played. Poker, blackjack, and just regular cards for some, everyone was in the common room enjoying themselves. It was really a lot of fun. Casino night died down kind of early, but not before I had the chance to announce that I needed everyone’s keys to put up the “schedule” for the next day. I took the keys, and the schedules, and me and a few guys went down to the girls cabin with our toilet paper rolls. I felt like a teenager again, even though I didn’t physically put the toilet paper in the rooms, I supervised the action and it was a masterpiece. The first girl who wanted to leave, wanted to leave almost immediately after we had TPed the cabins, but I convinced her to stay a little longer. She eventually found something to do, and another girl was the first to return to the cabin. When J’ita left, she returned about 2 minutes later—“REGIS! What did you do to our room?!” I played dumb and said, what do you  mean? I just put the schedule up! She told me about the toilet paper, and I pretended to be confused and asked her about the bathroom and she said, “You did it!” and I said, “I don’t know what your talking about!” She didn’t believe me and she went to the other girls to tell them what happened. I then saw them going to the “Wish Box” and I knew I was going to be in trouble the next morning! I took the blame for the other guys, even though later that night the guys made fun of the girls and they figured out it wasn’t me who actually did it. After casino night, we played mafia again, and this time, I had to stop it around midnight to make sure I wasn’t going to be falling asleep standing up the next day.
At the end of day four, I was completely satisfied. By now the students were getting along great, we were all having fun, the projects weren’t so stressful and camp life was great. And we still had another week!

Day 3: I’m the Favorite

By day three, the students were now making friends and we’ve had enough funny moments to make fun of people. I’m somehow the butt of many jokes, and everyone likes to pick on me and make me dance in front of everyone during the “Morning Energizer”. Each morning we start the day by waking the students up with exercises, funny movies, and some activities. There are two boxes, the Wish Box and the Gossip Box which are open for the students to put notes in. In the wish box, people can say, “I wish the red team goes up and does the chicken dance.” And the red team would have to go up and do the chicken dance. The Gossip Box has all the juicy gossip of the camp, “Frank and Natasha were dancing together last night” It’s all in good fun, and I can’t even describe some of the craziness that happens in the morning. Let’s just say, they’ve all figured out how much I hate dancing in front of everyone and now I have to dance almost every day.
Day three starts the beginning of Project 3, which is about managing their online reputation. It was a really good project to do, because most of the students were aware of privacy issues on the internet, but I think we made it clear that things on the internet are there forever. Each group had to pretend they were “Online Reputation Consultants” and they had to give a presentation about their company’s services on Day 4 to a university.
During the afternoon, we had a volleyball tournament for them. My team won and everybody that participated earned points for their team (Red, Yellow, Green or Blue). I think we had 3 people from the red team on my team, so that was really awesome. The summer sun by this time was getting really hot, and every day I was surprised to wake up to such beautiful weather. The students were really coming together and bonding.
After dinner, the students got ready for the “Masquerade Party” and each person made a special mask for the theme. This was the first party of the camp, and everyone enjoyed it. The music was loud, and everyone was dancing (all 20 of them at least) and it was kind of like an awkward high school dance at first. With only 20 students, there really isn’t that many people, but we made it work and everyone had a great time. The whole night I was trying to get the keys to the girls room from Jenny, because I wanted to start a toilet-paper war with the girls. We had already discussed this before, but Jenny didn’t feel like getting the keys so I compromised and told Jenny I would get them tomorrow. The guys were really excited to start pranking the girls and so was I. (hahaha, you wondered why I’m the favorite!) By this night, I was exhausted. It was becoming a lot of hard work, waking up at 8 am, thinking all day, coordinating the schedule, hanging out with the students, playing volleyball, laughing too much and everything. I was doing great, tired, and enjoying everything. But I could tell that some of the students were really not tired, so after the Masquerade Party ended at 11 PM or so, I suggested playing a game of Mafia (which is too much to explain here, but if you Wikipedia/Google it you can figure it out). We ended up playing mafia, and due to its addictive nature, we ended up playing until 1 AM. Ana, from Brazil, is probably the best Mafia player I’ve ever played with in my entire life. She knows who’s in the mafia after the first round, she knows who to save if she’s the doctor. It kind of took some fun out of the game because she is that good! I went to bed thinking that life at camp MBM was good and I was ready to start the next day.

Day 2: The 1st Presentation

Day 2 marked the groups first presentation to a university. Tete and I were leading the blue team for this project because we had prepared the marketing strategy education, but we were really struggling to incorporate two girls into the team. The blue team had two guys, both were outgoing and spoke English very well. One girl didn’t want to be there because her mom forced her to come to this camp, one girl didn’t feel a part of the team and never spoke, and the other girl was just shy, but would answer questions when we asked her and participated when she felt the need to. I’ll never forget Johnny (little John, not Big John) and how nervous he was to speak in front of everyone. I had to take him and tell him to breath for a while, but he explained that he doesn’t really like presentations at all, whether in Czech or English.
By day two the students were really starting to come out. The volleyball matches got a little more intense, and the talking increased. All of the faci’s are great. They are easily approachable, fun and outgoing. We were starting to get the hang of the daily routine and were getting more comofortable with our students. We weren’t really prepared for the next two weeks showering in common bathrooms, just like freshman year. Except this time, the curtains blew with the draft winds of the open doors and windows so during your shower, you were constantly warding off a wet plastic curtain from sticking to your behind. Not to mention the breeze was cold and by day 8, the hot water was hit or miss in the mornings. Although the faci’s had a private shower (for one person at a time) that always had hot water, it was much easier to just shower in the common bathroom because of time and you didn’t need a key. But when the hot water became a problem, no one really wanted to shower in the mornings, but we had to make do with what we had.
The second night we had a “Trip Around the World” for the night activity. This was when each faci got to talk for 10 minutes about their country. The students each had a giant map, hand-drawn by Harrison, to fill in at each station. The students really liked this event, but the faci’s didn’t plan properly and some were taking much more than 10 minutes. Ekta was doing sand mandalas and showing pictures of gods and festivals in India. She’s really made me want to go visit India, but only if I knew where to go and what to see (and the right time/place to go). Ana showed a slideshow of Brazil, as did Aysegul. Zhou Lin and Harrison both had presentations on China and Taiwan and Lessya showed pictures from Kazakhstan and explained traditional culture and what it is like to live in Kazakhstan. I only saw 2 teams by midnight, which was when we called it quits. The nights get very cold and the students were tired, so we didn’t get to finish. I talked about a few American holidays that they may not know about. The first was a 2 minute speech about Groundhog’s Day (haha, creative, I know!), then I talked about the 4th of July (which was coincidentally the next day), and then Thanksgiving. I tried to talk about the history of the Fourth and Thanksgiving, but don’t really remember much more than the basic facts. What I did talk about is the traditions of going out to the park on the 4th, having a BBQ, hanging out with friends and then searching for that perfect spot to enjoy the beautiful fireworks, no matter what city you’re in. For Thanksgiving, I talked about how the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day in the US, how Thanksgiving always starts with the Macy’s Day Parade on TV for the entire nation, and how everyone stuffs their face with ungodly amounts of food somewhere between the football game and family chatter. I then discussed the day after Thanksgiving, and Black Friday sales. They really enjoyed this and I also mentioned how Black Friday can be used to show the strength of the US economy—that’s how much money is spent this day. I think I did well for not having any pictures or music (my hard drive is useless so I left it in Prague with my other suitcase.

Day 1: Capture the Flag

The day after camp started, everything was running smooth. We were ahead of schedule, because things were much quicker than planned, but we corrected it and moved things around to create a perfect schedule. The Czech students love to play volleyball, and I love to too, so we played for hours during the breaks in the warm sun. The first project was challenging, it was about Marketing Strategy of a university (from the perspective of a student). I was amazed by the ideas they came up with. For guerilla marketing, the yellow team came up with putting a “Bathtub of Money” in a public place, with the bills being pamphlets of information about the university. The red team thought of great posters and logos for an international university. The blue team came up with a marketing strategy for a university and told the university what matters to them may be different than what they may have thought. The green team though of a media plan that focused the university’s marketing online and in catchy places. I was really impressed.
At night, it was time for “Capture the Flag”. This was me and Ekta’s night activity, so we had each team paint a flag with their team colors. We divided the camp into five parts, and gave each team a zone to protect. The faci’s played too, and we had our own flag to hide too. There was a “jail” where if you got caught by another team, you were forced to wait in jail until someone from your team bailed you out. The game started out perfectly, but we quickly realized that the zones were too big and it was nearly impossible to steal people’s flags. Not to mention the green team hid their flag in a field of “kopšiva” or the Czech equivalent of poison ivy or something. Needless to say, after an hour and half of battle, the students were tired, but not broken down. The red team managed to capture two flags, the green and the blue team, but not without a price. Poor John had to slather his arms in ointment because of the kopšiva fields he went through to get the green flag. Everyone had a blast and some were frustrated with the difficulty in getting the flags. The faci team didn’t capture a flag, but were so close to the blue team and red team it was not even funny. We literally walked by both team’s flags and didn’t notice they were there, although both were clearly visible, but greatly disguised.  Day 1 was a good day.

Camp 1--Arrival Day

The first day of camp was crazy. All of us were nervous and excited to begin what has been an intense few weeks of preparation. When the students arrived, we had a welcome ceremony and some “getting to know each other” games. I quickly realized that we were ahead of schedule by at least 30 minutes, and had to change the schedule accordingly. The students were really outgoing and all of us were relieved to see them speaking out and not being too shy. It was perfect. We were still faced with the difficult task of making 20 teenagers feel comfortable with each other so we spent some group time together with them. Tete and I were partners for this camp and we were TEAM RED! (Whoo!) We had a great group which consisted of five students. John, also known as “Big John” was a tall lanky guy who always had a smile on his face and was always laughing, falling down, getting injured and being the funny guy. He was definitely the center of attention for a handful of stories, which hopefully I’ll get to tell you in the next few weeks. Marta was a quiet girl, but very smart and witty. She was educated and well rounded. She was our best actress whenever our team had to perform skits. She moved from being the shy one, to taking a great leadership role in our group, and that made me very happy. Then there was Zuzka, or Susie. Every day she reminded me of my cousin. Quiet and shy, she was thin and small but was never afraid to smile. She was by far the quietest of our group, but surprised me time and time again with her ideas and ability to perform under pressure. She’s one of my favorites and I’ll never forget how much of a leader she is, even when she isn’t in the position of leader. Jana, or Jane, was our creative powerhouse of our group. She was always thinking of new ideas and was definitely one of the most energetic ones of the group. Although she had some issues with the team, I really enjoyed her input and positive attitude. She reminded me of a teenager from the movies—high dreams, tough life, but still trying to stay positive through all the challenges thrown at her. She was never afraid to act the way she wanted, whatever anyone thought of it. And last was Marika. Marika was a blonde-haired blue-eyed girl who kept a notebook of all the English words she didn’t know. She was constantly asking questions about our cultures and lives and would always start the conversation by sharing her opinion or ideas. She was funny and lively and a real sweetheart.
If you haven’t noticed, the Red Team was diverse in personality and interests, but one thing was certain. We were the smartest group. Not saying that the other teams weren’t smart, because they definitely had so many ideas that even I was amazed by some of the projects, but we were definitely logical and methodical and usually did better in intellectual challenges than physical challenges. Red Team brainstormed in English, when most groups did in Czech, and they all spoke English very well. Some teams had students who really struggled to speak English, but for the most part, everyone on Red Team could present in English without having to read a pre-made speech. Physically, we weren’t the best team, but still gave the other teams a challenge. Overall, I’m going to miss the Red Team very much, but I must not forget that I have another camp ahead of me, and I’m sure I’ll love those students as much as these ones.
Stay tuned for more, I’ll be scheduling posts almost every day for the next two weeks!

Back to Earth!

Wow! It's good to finally have internet again! I feel like I've had no connection to the outside world. I've spent the last two weeks living off a Blackberry, which got EDGE service at the camp. This meant I could check my gmail every once in a while, although it took 10 minutes to load (if it loaded at all). Anyway, I'm excited to tell you all about the first camp, but first I have to tell you about my journey from camp to Vienna!

Camp ended perfectly, with everyone thoroughly overwhelmed with emotions about leaving the people they had gotten to know so closely the past couple weeks. There were tears, laughs, and hugs to say goodbye to each other. Every single one of the students made a huge impact on us, and we're all so excited to see how much they grew as people during their time at MBM. When it finally came time to say goodbye, I was wondering to myself, when, during these past few weeks, these students changed from shy people into a close-knit group of friends that have experienced so much together. It really made me happy.

On our bus from Velké Meziřiči to Brno was great. Although most of the students went to Prague, we had Frank, Johnny and Igor to accompany us to Brno. I fell asleep right away because I was absolutely exhausted, and when we arrived to Brno, we had 20 minutes to get from one bus station to the other. Remember how I'm always running to catch a bus, train, plane, boat, etc etc? Well this time, I didn't have to! But I almost did. It was me, Harrison and the 6 girls each with luggage and tired from camp. And getting from one bus station to the next was about as fun as trying to drag a stubborn bull to the market (bad analogy, but I'm tired so give me a break). We ended up arriving to the other bus station a few minutes before our bus departed, and I was convinced that we were going to have to run for it.

Our bus from Brno to Vienna (Wien) was a wonderful ride through the countryside. I once again fell asleep but luckily this bus had nice air conditioning and comfortable seats. When we arrived in Vienna, I had to navigate the subways and dig through my backpack for the hostel information. We were staying at a hostel right off the subway line, and so we began to search for the line, which was luckily right around the corner. We went to the subway and I found our stop. Everything is now in Euros, which means I'm going to be absolutely devastated when I go to purchase items that are American prices (2 euro waters, 4 euro sandwiches, etc) but really in Euros which means that It's not a $2 bottle of water but $2.50 and so on and so on. It doesn't help that Vienna is one of the most expensive cities in Europe (we just found out) but I'm pretty sure that tomorrow will be an awesome day full of fun.

When we arrived to our hostel, we checked in and found out that actually when we made the reservation we only made it for four people for two nights. That means that four of us are in deep trouble! It actually wasn't me who booked this but I paid for it to make it easier for everyone, and our preparation for this trip wasn't quite spectacular. We went out for Ana's birthday the night before, and we were rushing to go to the Green Day concert in Prague afterwards (which was a spectacular show!), so I can easily see how this confusion happened. Luckily the hostel has room for everyone tonight for a decent price (15 euro per person), but four of us have to move out tomorrow because they don't have enough beds for everyone for two nights. Luckily, I'm staying with Jolin, Ekta and Aysegul at the hostel and Ana, Tete, Harrison and Lessya are going to find another hostel or hotel to live in tomorrow. I know we won't have this problem in Budapest (because I had double and triple checked everything before hand), but knowing my luck, we'll probably get lost or something finding the place.

When everything was settled with the hostel, we dropped our stuff off and made our way into the city center. It was already 8 PM by the time we left, and when we arrived, we walked around a bit and found a really nice Asian place to eat. The funniest part about dinner was that there were Chinese people working in the restaurant, and it was easier for me to speak Chinese with them than to try and order in English or German (the language spoken in Austria). After dinner, we walked along the Danube River (the longest in Europe) and called it a night. We've all been internet starved and so we headed back to the hostel to catch up on our lives at home.

I'm extremely tired right now, so I apologize if this post doesn't make sense or is a little messy. I'm heading to bed. Tomorrow we're waking up early to go sight seeing. Be prepared for when I return to Velké Meziřiči for the second camp, I'll have a post scheduled for every single day I'm away. Good night!