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!