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Got back yesterday from AFS camp and went straight to bed. Surfaced briefly for roast chicken, then went back to sleep.
Camp was really good, great even. I wasn't sure how it was going to be - whether the other volunteers would accept me for being so young and being so freshly back, whether the students would accept me bossing them around when half of them are older than I am - but I was surprised about how positively everything turned out. I didn't have quite the responsibilities of the other AFS co-ordinators, but I still helped them out, and helped the students in other ways, too.
There was one other returnee, Gareth, who's twenty and went to Paraguay in 07, and he really made the camp for me, to be honest. The students were great, especially some of them, and the co-ordinators weren't bad, but Gareth was the one I had the most in common with and we spent most of camp hanging out together.
The kids were cool; most of them were very friendly and interested in the activities we were getting them to do. This was End-Of-Stay camp for most of them, and it was interesting how much lighter their camp was than my end of stay. We just spent our whole time crying and holding each other, but these guys were just laughing and chilling out and stuff. I don't really feel like we did enough exercises to help prepare them for going back - or they wouldn't have been so cheerful :P - but I talked to quite a few of them one-on-one, just to share some of my experiences and hopefully give them a better idea about what they were coming back to.
Some of the activities we did were pretty stupid, one or two so dull it left even the volunteers WTFing, but there was no one totally above it all, thank god. And there was plenty of time left for the kids to hang out, which was basically all they wanted to do anyway. On Saturday night, most of them didn't go to bed at all, and I swear, those South American girls are like NOTHING ELSE. One of them danced from about 11 to 6 in the morning. I absolutely do not know how she got the energy.
Oh, and when I say <i>they</i> didn't go to bed, I actually mean <i>we</i> didn't go to bed. All the co-ordinators had to be reasonably well rested to drive back home on Sunday, so Gareth and I stayed up all night to make sure no one set fire to things or got pregnant etc etc. As far as I'm aware, none of that happened, but honestly, I wasn't following people going out for 'walks' just to make sure. No one even brought out alcohol, which is a bummer, because Gareth and I had planned to confiscate any booze presented and drink it ourselves, but it was not to be.
Oh yeah, and Gareth. Heh.
That is not a guilty heh, by the way. That is a just-as-well-someone-interrupted-us-before-we-did-something-stupid heh. Not saying that we would have, just that we certainly could have. We hit it off really well, so we were hanging out all the time and then went for a walk last night and I was hitting on his knee and we were chatting and he kept shoving his FREEZING nose into my neck and stuff, and... well, it wasn't an issue because then Charles, another of the volunteers came up to make sure we weren't students sneaking off to get drunk and it was all cool. Then after a while we went back inside cos it was bloody freezing, and we sat on the couch together and cuddled up and chatted.
He's got a girlfriend, and I - yeah, that's right, I have a boyfriend (for the first time in like, a century). It wasn't a big deal, we didn't do anything sexual, but you do get the feeling that had we not had partners, or had we been drunk, we would have gotten involved. I think he actually did try kiss me a couple of times, but I kinda turned my face away and just carried on with the conversation, so no biggy. He's invited me down to Dunedin (where he lives, btw) for his 21st, which is the week after mine (18 yay!) and I invited him up to mine. If we keep in touch I fully intend to go down there for it.
So yeah, we're friends. We've been texting each other more or less since we got back into cell phone reception, chatting about this and that. He's cool, and we do really get on very well, so I'm happy to leave it at that, at least for now. As for the future? Well, I'll figure that out when I get there. Plus, he lives in DUNEDIN, ew.
And I'm going to hang out with Thabo tomorrow, yay!
Camp was really good, great even. I wasn't sure how it was going to be - whether the other volunteers would accept me for being so young and being so freshly back, whether the students would accept me bossing them around when half of them are older than I am - but I was surprised about how positively everything turned out. I didn't have quite the responsibilities of the other AFS co-ordinators, but I still helped them out, and helped the students in other ways, too.
There was one other returnee, Gareth, who's twenty and went to Paraguay in 07, and he really made the camp for me, to be honest. The students were great, especially some of them, and the co-ordinators weren't bad, but Gareth was the one I had the most in common with and we spent most of camp hanging out together.
The kids were cool; most of them were very friendly and interested in the activities we were getting them to do. This was End-Of-Stay camp for most of them, and it was interesting how much lighter their camp was than my end of stay. We just spent our whole time crying and holding each other, but these guys were just laughing and chilling out and stuff. I don't really feel like we did enough exercises to help prepare them for going back - or they wouldn't have been so cheerful :P - but I talked to quite a few of them one-on-one, just to share some of my experiences and hopefully give them a better idea about what they were coming back to.
Some of the activities we did were pretty stupid, one or two so dull it left even the volunteers WTFing, but there was no one totally above it all, thank god. And there was plenty of time left for the kids to hang out, which was basically all they wanted to do anyway. On Saturday night, most of them didn't go to bed at all, and I swear, those South American girls are like NOTHING ELSE. One of them danced from about 11 to 6 in the morning. I absolutely do not know how she got the energy.
Oh, and when I say <i>they</i> didn't go to bed, I actually mean <i>we</i> didn't go to bed. All the co-ordinators had to be reasonably well rested to drive back home on Sunday, so Gareth and I stayed up all night to make sure no one set fire to things or got pregnant etc etc. As far as I'm aware, none of that happened, but honestly, I wasn't following people going out for 'walks' just to make sure. No one even brought out alcohol, which is a bummer, because Gareth and I had planned to confiscate any booze presented and drink it ourselves, but it was not to be.
Oh yeah, and Gareth. Heh.
That is not a guilty heh, by the way. That is a just-as-well-someone-interrupted-us-before-we-did-something-stupid heh. Not saying that we would have, just that we certainly could have. We hit it off really well, so we were hanging out all the time and then went for a walk last night and I was hitting on his knee and we were chatting and he kept shoving his FREEZING nose into my neck and stuff, and... well, it wasn't an issue because then Charles, another of the volunteers came up to make sure we weren't students sneaking off to get drunk and it was all cool. Then after a while we went back inside cos it was bloody freezing, and we sat on the couch together and cuddled up and chatted.
He's got a girlfriend, and I - yeah, that's right, I have a boyfriend (for the first time in like, a century). It wasn't a big deal, we didn't do anything sexual, but you do get the feeling that had we not had partners, or had we been drunk, we would have gotten involved. I think he actually did try kiss me a couple of times, but I kinda turned my face away and just carried on with the conversation, so no biggy. He's invited me down to Dunedin (where he lives, btw) for his 21st, which is the week after mine (18 yay!) and I invited him up to mine. If we keep in touch I fully intend to go down there for it.
So yeah, we're friends. We've been texting each other more or less since we got back into cell phone reception, chatting about this and that. He's cool, and we do really get on very well, so I'm happy to leave it at that, at least for now. As for the future? Well, I'll figure that out when I get there. Plus, he lives in DUNEDIN, ew.
And I'm going to hang out with Thabo tomorrow, yay!
