8.27.08 International Work Camp.

That little girl was my best friend at camp even if she did abuse me with that racket.

What is that? In short it is a 2 week extravaganza of learning how to work with others giving some children something to do in a poor country in Europe. Here is the down and dirty.
It began on the 4th of August. The first of august I moved out of my house where I was living with a host family for a more comfortable environment of living on my own in an apartment. It really was my goal from the first day I did come to site was to get back to some normalcy for myself and live on my own again. It is quite a shock to not only move into another country but also move into another family. I mean I had fun living with my real family in the state but once I hit 18 I was ready to get out and do my own thing! So being forced to live with a family was a good experience but I was ready to move out once I could.

Any way, back to the camp. I left my house the first of August only to find out my apartment that I was going to be moving into was going to take a few extra days to finish before I was going to be moving in and living there. No problem, I took off down to the south to where my old host family lived and stayed with them for 3 days or so expecting to come home to an apartment ready for me.

Unfortunately or fortunately it was not completed and they quoted me a few more days. (lets just say this quoting 3 days into the future goes on for nearly 4 weeks before I was finally able to move in… last night).

So I needed a place to stay in the mean time… Farina my German site mate had space at her house but it came with a catch… I am not working full time with this camp her organization put together for 2 weeks and sharing her accommodations with 12 other volunteers from all over Europe plus Azerbaijan.

I had a really great time all in all and made some good friends from countries all over the place. The camp taught me a lot about how to go about planning a camp, and team work, and managing expectations.

The scenario was this… 12 volunteers with a a description of their 2 week service was working with disabled teens ages 18-20 somethings… and what they were brought into was a 2 week summer camp working with kids ages 7-14. Quite a surprise for a few of them but they took it well and we put on a sporadic camp from 9-4 every day then spent the evening planning for the next day and cooking for ourselves. We did this with no running water (water was out for the city for the first week and a half) so bucket baths and one outhouse for all of us. I slept on the floor on a few blankets and we all were mercilessly attacked by mosquitoes who feasted on all of our foreign bodies like it was thanks giving.

Nearly everybody went home happy and we all learned about each others country and culture such as … nearly all of them didn’t like America for various reasons and in the end they all liked me so they thought America can’t be all that bad ;-)