Plum Tuckered Out
I got back from Cameron's Highlands yesterday. I had a church camp there between Friday and Monday, and my goodness it was draining. Yes, I enjoyed it. Yes, I suppose it was very helpful to a lot of people and I'm sure God blessed the whole thing. But my goodness, I'm so tired. Thank heavens I've got another two weeks or so to recuperate before (oh heavens! mercy on me) I go for the MONTH-LONG RBS in January.
(RBS = Residential Bible School, and it simply means a bible school that you can sleep in.)
...before I start making it sound like I was strung up by the ankles and tortured, let me say that it was a great camp. I really did enjoy it, and I do think God was there (then again, He's everywhere) and was busy at it, too. It was most enjoyable and I liked it. And I wouldn't mind going for another one.
But...ok, I'll start from Friday morning when I woke up, had breakfast, and apparently took too long to eat my peanut butter because I had to rush off and leave everything in a (bigger) mess. I did manage to wash the cutlery though.
We chartered a school bus to ferry us up, but in retrospect we ought to have made sure the driver was experienced. You see, there are two routes up Cameron's. One is ancient and is on every map of the region that exists. It's also extremely winding and twisted, and has the ability to induce motion sickness. I remember drinking a cup of Horlicks once before a trip on that road and throwing up before ten minutes had passed.
The other route is newer and more comfortable, but not so well-known. At least, it apparently isn't known at all to the bus driver we got, because he went for the older route. Thank God nobody had a very heavy breakfast, so nobody threw up, even though Volcano turned quite green and had to force himself to sleep so he wouldn't vomit.
In any case everybody got to the campsite clean and, er, more or less green in the face. I'm sure I looked a bit sick myself. At least everybody recovered once on terra firma. It was afternoon by then, though; and the bus's air-conditioning was quite powerful (Free Tea and the people in the seats behind and in front of him had a grand time playing with the vent directions), so my glasses got a bit foggy. Certainly it was rather a transition between extreme cold and unexpected heat.
In any case everything was pretty clear-cut at the time. Claus, Jogger, and a few others had gone up to prepare the place the day before, so the dorms were quite nicely set out and the food was ready and stuff. (I shared a room with Jogger, the Rabbit, and Volcano. The room opposite mine had 12 occupants, and I can't remember everyone there.)
We got all the bags into the dorms, and from then on everything was pretty much according to schedule: icebreakers, worship sessions, speaking from the speaker, and then a bit of discussion (we split up into groups for this, because the campers ranged in age from 12 to about 30 or so).
I happened to be the discussion leader for my group, by which I mean that I had a set of "preferred" answers for the questions, just in case we went off into heresy or something. But as it turned out I didn't have to worry about that since the group (which, by the way, was composed of 6 other people older than myself and Free Tea) turned out to be pretty much OK as far as doctrine is concerned. Maybe the extra bits of trivia I know helped a bit there, I don't know.
(One of them later commented that she really wanted to be like me, which I find extremely worrying. It implies that I was on split-personality mode during the entire camp--or else she never saw my room, because my bed was a mess within 15 minutes of my arrival.)
In any case, I was quite stressed out for the discussion groups, simply because I've never been very good at the whole discussion thing. Where there's a question, I usually see it as having a certain set of right answers or wrong answers, and...well, when you're talking about God and what He wants, that set of answers gets pretty clear-cut. As things turned out, I was disproved and the set of answers got considerably broadened.
The games were the real killer, as I discovered on the second day. You see, the camp site was quite large--spread out across several buildings and chalets, all of which (simply because the place is a MOUNTAIN) are on different heights. So the committee decided to have a bunch of stations, a la Amazing Race, at several places.
The group went rushing about, and we.. well, we didn't collapse since we didn't really run much. It's not advisable to run down slopes. Besides, we did pretty OK considering most of the group was female and I'm not athletic in any way, so I guess for our overall state of fitness, we did surprisingly well. Not to mention that nobody got any sprains or cramps or anything. (And the girls were very good sports about getting wet!)
Now there's one thing you have to know about Christian camps. They all seem to have a traditional night, usually the last one or second-last one, where every group has to go on stage and perform some kind of skit, which they write themselves using whatever material is supplied by the camp committee. Props are also self-made, and generally run along the lines of torchlights, mahjong paper, sticky tape, or whatever is available.
(This is why some people, who have gone to such camps before, tend to stock strange items in their bags to use for the skits. This year we didn't see anything particularly eye-brow raising, but I recall somebody bringing a plastic plant once.)
For this one, two groups were merged and given a random sentence from the Bible. My group was merged with the Coconut's (yay for me. *grin*) and our verses were "My little finger is thicker than my father's waist" and "Who is he, and where is he, who has dared to do such a thing!"
The first thing that everybody thought, when reading those sentences, was sumo warriors. And... well, we strung together enough nonsense (that's my specialty. I can out-crap anybody, any day, and still make it sound plausible.) to get first place. (Yay for me again.)
And then we found some more...err...acting talent. Her Majesty's little sister dragged a couple of friends along, and they decided to have a mock Mafia scene. Unfortunately, they didn't calculate on the presence of a few kids (like I said, quite a bit of the camp was under 18) and their language was... abusive. Not to mention the fight scenes, which were perhaps a little too realistic... Mrs. Gorilla didn't like it much... I didn't mind it myself except when they slammed the doors, because those doors really were fragile...I suppose the Gibbon and Sunglasses (this was the first camp for them both) didn't know the constraints, since I could see they really threw themselves into the acting...still, I made sure to congratulate them while advising them to keep the violence down in future.
The Rabbit snored in his sleep a lot that night, but in retrospect I think he might have had a nightmare or something. After all, he's only 12 and I don't think he's had a lot of violence in his life yet.
...the day after that was the treasure hunt, and well, you can't go particularly different with these things. You stick up riddles and clues in places that lead people to other places and so on until the end.
Well, my group finished last. Absolutely last, because we rushed so much that we overlooked the clues. No kidding... when we backtracked (when we were told that we were the only group that hadn't finished, all the kiasu spirit just drained away) at a leisurely pace, we found the clues in spots that we thought we'd triple-checked already.
And well, all that rushing took place on a slope, remember, so by this time I was suffering from advanced tiredness... when we finally got everything done, I collapsed onto the nearest mattress I could see and stayed there until I dragged myself off to dinner.
(Well, it's not the first time I've been dead tired. It's just the first time I've been dead tired in front of so many people. Claus reports that the next morning, when he tried to wake me up, I kicked him in my sleep.)
That night was the altar call. There were, if I remember right, four parties in heaven that night. (Sorry, insider joke. There's a verse in the Bible where it says every new believer causes God and the angels to rejoice, i.e. party.)
Later that night (the last night of the camp, the lights-out call was delayed to 12am to give us more time to lie around), we turned the whole campsite into one big card game: Mafia, SitBigTwo, Pig, and so on. And then the Coconut and her sister and her cousins (the camp was, literally, one big network of families) cornered the camp speaker, taught him to play SitBigTwo...and cheated.
O.o
He now owes them a meal at McDonald's.
...the trip back was yesterday, and they sent us the exact same driver who took us up, so everybody went down on the exact same winding trail that we took up. This time, though, everybody had just eaten lunch, so we had to distribute motion-sickness pills (actually I think they were sleeping pills...) to everybody who wanted them. I took one too since I'd had a rather big lunch. (Actually all of my meals were big ones. Cameron's is cold so appetites increase...and my appetite can be surprisingly large even when I'm warm.)
We got really heavy rain on the way down, so the trip (which was supposed to take 4 hours) took 6 hours. It got quite boring, but I was asleep through most of it so... yeah, I suppose I shouldn't call it boring since I was contributing to its boringness. All the same, we had lots of snacks around (thank God!) so we passed the time by fattening up. Naturally, the air-conditioning made us really really cold (a lot of the people on the bus never removed their jackets at all) so we ate... more.
At any rate, here I am now, having compressed the last 96 hours or so of my life into a humongously long blog post. Happy?
(RBS = Residential Bible School, and it simply means a bible school that you can sleep in.)
...before I start making it sound like I was strung up by the ankles and tortured, let me say that it was a great camp. I really did enjoy it, and I do think God was there (then again, He's everywhere) and was busy at it, too. It was most enjoyable and I liked it. And I wouldn't mind going for another one.
But...ok, I'll start from Friday morning when I woke up, had breakfast, and apparently took too long to eat my peanut butter because I had to rush off and leave everything in a (bigger) mess. I did manage to wash the cutlery though.
We chartered a school bus to ferry us up, but in retrospect we ought to have made sure the driver was experienced. You see, there are two routes up Cameron's. One is ancient and is on every map of the region that exists. It's also extremely winding and twisted, and has the ability to induce motion sickness. I remember drinking a cup of Horlicks once before a trip on that road and throwing up before ten minutes had passed.
The other route is newer and more comfortable, but not so well-known. At least, it apparently isn't known at all to the bus driver we got, because he went for the older route. Thank God nobody had a very heavy breakfast, so nobody threw up, even though Volcano turned quite green and had to force himself to sleep so he wouldn't vomit.
In any case everybody got to the campsite clean and, er, more or less green in the face. I'm sure I looked a bit sick myself. At least everybody recovered once on terra firma. It was afternoon by then, though; and the bus's air-conditioning was quite powerful (Free Tea and the people in the seats behind and in front of him had a grand time playing with the vent directions), so my glasses got a bit foggy. Certainly it was rather a transition between extreme cold and unexpected heat.
In any case everything was pretty clear-cut at the time. Claus, Jogger, and a few others had gone up to prepare the place the day before, so the dorms were quite nicely set out and the food was ready and stuff. (I shared a room with Jogger, the Rabbit, and Volcano. The room opposite mine had 12 occupants, and I can't remember everyone there.)
We got all the bags into the dorms, and from then on everything was pretty much according to schedule: icebreakers, worship sessions, speaking from the speaker, and then a bit of discussion (we split up into groups for this, because the campers ranged in age from 12 to about 30 or so).
I happened to be the discussion leader for my group, by which I mean that I had a set of "preferred" answers for the questions, just in case we went off into heresy or something. But as it turned out I didn't have to worry about that since the group (which, by the way, was composed of 6 other people older than myself and Free Tea) turned out to be pretty much OK as far as doctrine is concerned. Maybe the extra bits of trivia I know helped a bit there, I don't know.
(One of them later commented that she really wanted to be like me, which I find extremely worrying. It implies that I was on split-personality mode during the entire camp--or else she never saw my room, because my bed was a mess within 15 minutes of my arrival.)
In any case, I was quite stressed out for the discussion groups, simply because I've never been very good at the whole discussion thing. Where there's a question, I usually see it as having a certain set of right answers or wrong answers, and...well, when you're talking about God and what He wants, that set of answers gets pretty clear-cut. As things turned out, I was disproved and the set of answers got considerably broadened.
The games were the real killer, as I discovered on the second day. You see, the camp site was quite large--spread out across several buildings and chalets, all of which (simply because the place is a MOUNTAIN) are on different heights. So the committee decided to have a bunch of stations, a la Amazing Race, at several places.
The group went rushing about, and we.. well, we didn't collapse since we didn't really run much. It's not advisable to run down slopes. Besides, we did pretty OK considering most of the group was female and I'm not athletic in any way, so I guess for our overall state of fitness, we did surprisingly well. Not to mention that nobody got any sprains or cramps or anything. (And the girls were very good sports about getting wet!)
Now there's one thing you have to know about Christian camps. They all seem to have a traditional night, usually the last one or second-last one, where every group has to go on stage and perform some kind of skit, which they write themselves using whatever material is supplied by the camp committee. Props are also self-made, and generally run along the lines of torchlights, mahjong paper, sticky tape, or whatever is available.
(This is why some people, who have gone to such camps before, tend to stock strange items in their bags to use for the skits. This year we didn't see anything particularly eye-brow raising, but I recall somebody bringing a plastic plant once.)
For this one, two groups were merged and given a random sentence from the Bible. My group was merged with the Coconut's (yay for me. *grin*) and our verses were "My little finger is thicker than my father's waist" and "Who is he, and where is he, who has dared to do such a thing!"
The first thing that everybody thought, when reading those sentences, was sumo warriors. And... well, we strung together enough nonsense (that's my specialty. I can out-crap anybody, any day, and still make it sound plausible.) to get first place. (Yay for me again.)
And then we found some more...err...acting talent. Her Majesty's little sister dragged a couple of friends along, and they decided to have a mock Mafia scene. Unfortunately, they didn't calculate on the presence of a few kids (like I said, quite a bit of the camp was under 18) and their language was... abusive. Not to mention the fight scenes, which were perhaps a little too realistic... Mrs. Gorilla didn't like it much... I didn't mind it myself except when they slammed the doors, because those doors really were fragile...I suppose the Gibbon and Sunglasses (this was the first camp for them both) didn't know the constraints, since I could see they really threw themselves into the acting...still, I made sure to congratulate them while advising them to keep the violence down in future.
The Rabbit snored in his sleep a lot that night, but in retrospect I think he might have had a nightmare or something. After all, he's only 12 and I don't think he's had a lot of violence in his life yet.
...the day after that was the treasure hunt, and well, you can't go particularly different with these things. You stick up riddles and clues in places that lead people to other places and so on until the end.
Well, my group finished last. Absolutely last, because we rushed so much that we overlooked the clues. No kidding... when we backtracked (when we were told that we were the only group that hadn't finished, all the kiasu spirit just drained away) at a leisurely pace, we found the clues in spots that we thought we'd triple-checked already.
And well, all that rushing took place on a slope, remember, so by this time I was suffering from advanced tiredness... when we finally got everything done, I collapsed onto the nearest mattress I could see and stayed there until I dragged myself off to dinner.
(Well, it's not the first time I've been dead tired. It's just the first time I've been dead tired in front of so many people. Claus reports that the next morning, when he tried to wake me up, I kicked him in my sleep.)
That night was the altar call. There were, if I remember right, four parties in heaven that night. (Sorry, insider joke. There's a verse in the Bible where it says every new believer causes God and the angels to rejoice, i.e. party.)
Later that night (the last night of the camp, the lights-out call was delayed to 12am to give us more time to lie around), we turned the whole campsite into one big card game: Mafia, SitBigTwo, Pig, and so on. And then the Coconut and her sister and her cousins (the camp was, literally, one big network of families) cornered the camp speaker, taught him to play SitBigTwo...and cheated.
O.o
He now owes them a meal at McDonald's.
...the trip back was yesterday, and they sent us the exact same driver who took us up, so everybody went down on the exact same winding trail that we took up. This time, though, everybody had just eaten lunch, so we had to distribute motion-sickness pills (actually I think they were sleeping pills...) to everybody who wanted them. I took one too since I'd had a rather big lunch. (Actually all of my meals were big ones. Cameron's is cold so appetites increase...and my appetite can be surprisingly large even when I'm warm.)
We got really heavy rain on the way down, so the trip (which was supposed to take 4 hours) took 6 hours. It got quite boring, but I was asleep through most of it so... yeah, I suppose I shouldn't call it boring since I was contributing to its boringness. All the same, we had lots of snacks around (thank God!) so we passed the time by fattening up. Naturally, the air-conditioning made us really really cold (a lot of the people on the bus never removed their jackets at all) so we ate... more.
At any rate, here I am now, having compressed the last 96 hours or so of my life into a humongously long blog post. Happy?
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