27 Luni

Throughout the remainder of the week at TOBE the campers participated in similar activities to those outlined in my previous blog post.  This final post in the series on TOBE will attempt to highlight those activities which I feel were the most relevant and beneficial.  The purpose of this post is perhaps more for cataloging the activities for future reflection and may seem more academic than previous posts; though I will try to interject with interesting stories about the students when they come to mind.

Before we get started here’s a quick note on performance expectations.  One thing that I learned fairly early on during my week at TOBE is that Romanian teenagers, perhaps just like American teenagers, have their own agenda.  Telling them what, how and when to do something is about as effective as properly picking up sushi with one chopstick.  The most you can do is coax them in the general direction you hope to go.  Punctuality is virtually nonexistent here, as we would regularly begin sessions ten to fifteen minutes late, if not more.  Coming from a world where you’re late unless you’re early, this has taken a lot of getting used to and has pushed my patience to the maximum.  The best you can do here is tell a group that an event starts earlier than it really does and hope they make it more or less on time and in the meanwhile, plan your lessons around floating start and end points.  The one time where punctuality holds true is at mealtime; without fail there would be a line around the main tent well before the food was even supposed to have arrived.  Additionally, I noticed that focus and commitment to various sessions waned as the week went on and start times continued to slip more and more egregiously.  Perhaps this was because the campers knew the week was coming to a close, or perhaps they became more comfortable with us as counselors and hence felt they need pay less attention.  In fact, several activities in the end were cancelled or forgotten about completely as camper focus became more difficult to maintain.  The question in my mind is whether or not this should simply be culturally accepted or is this the fault of the program for failing to maintain a sustained, high-level of interest.

“Everyone is a Firework,” that is what one camper regularly said as we led a series of sessions one day with a focus on personal values.  Since no two fireworks are exactly the same, he was implying that every one of us is unique in our own way and that we all have a varying set of values and characteristics.  Earlier in the morning we broke off into tribes and each counselor was assigned to facilitate a conversation on values.  For an icebreaker we used the Hot Air Balloon game that I have described in an earlier post.  This time, Martin Luther King, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, and Madonna were selected.  A heated debate ensued, but in the end Adam lost to Jim and was thrown from the balloon.  After a quick discussion on what values actually are, how they are defined and why they are important, each camper was given a list of approximately fifty values and was instructed to select five to seven that most identify them.  Before going around the circle and optional discussing the values each camper circled, we talked a little about the values of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mother Teresa and a handful of other prominent individuals known for standing up for their beliefs.  As each camper openly discussed their various values, I was amazed that not only were they willing to share, but that they had logical and deep reasoning for why they selected the handful that they did.  This was another moment where the campers exceeded my expectations.  Once everyone had an opportunity to discuss his list, we then asked them to narrow it down to just two and to write them in big letters on a sheet of paper.  Next all of the groups reconvened in the big tent and an auction was held.  Each camper was given credits worth twenty thousand and had the opportunity to bid for those values that are most important to them.  The idea here was for them to think about how important each value is and what it feels like to lose one to a higher bidder.  To make things more interesting, the campers unknowingly could pair up, pool their money and share the values equally that they won.

“The Totemic Tower” was another activity designed to further address teambuilding.  Each tribe was given a different initial set of clues, including a map and a basic framework for the game in which they learned that they would later build a tower.  They then had to go out into the community, scale a hillside and find the clues marked on the map.  Each set of clues led them to another set which culminated in one of four things regarding the tower: location, materials, design part one and design part two.  The goal was for the tribes to realize that they needed to work with the other tribes in order to successfully complete the objective.  Admittedly, it took quite a bit longer than we had hoped for the teams to make this realization.  With a handful of obvious leaders directing the flow of work, we began to see make shift towers going up in various parts of the camp.  With a little additional prodding, they figured it out and erected the proper tower in the right location shortly after dark that night.  Regardless of how long it took for the solution to be reached, the moral of the activity was clearly conveyed back to us during the nightly debrief.

Another interesting team activity that we used was aptly named “Tribes.”  Each of the four tribes was given a simple but unique objective that they had to achieve before time was up.  The first tribe was told that they have an important totem pole that has been damaged and that they must obtain building materials to fix it.  This first group was given some marbles to barter with and was instructed that they were not allowed to traverse beyond the boundaries of their own land.  The second group was given the objective to incorporate tall men into their tribe and they were given building materials to possibly trade with.  This group was also told that they were not allowed to travel beyond the confines of their land.  The third group was given two bicycles that could be used to travel from one civilization to another, but only when driven by one of them and they could only take one passenger along.  This group’s objective was to collect as much “stuff” as possible.  The final group was designated to be Historians.  Their role was to travel freely, but unnoticed, between the civilizations and to document the other group’s activities and progress.  Later the Historians were instructed to present their findings to the whole group.  Before getting started, each group is given time to develop a story behind who they are and why they are motivated to the objectives they were given.  They were encouraged to create a tribe name, and back-story, but perhaps most interestingly their own language.  In the end this proved to be more of a red herring than anything, as each tribe got bogged down on actually creating their own elaborate language.  The purpose really was that they had to meet their goals without speaking to the other tribes (or Historians) in Romanian or English.  This type of activity is thoroughly interesting to watch as an outsider who is aware of the bigger picture.  As I observed, I could see tribes making missteps but I could only marginally step in to help remind them of their objectives and the rules.  Ultimately the group as a whole did well with the exercise and again, regardless of the outcome, everyone seem to learn something from the activity.

After reading the last couple paragraphs, you might say “Why not just lock the boys up in a padded room, put lab coats on them, and force them to solve astrophysics problems all day?”  This is a summer camp after all; it wasn’t all about mind-bending exercises, strategic thinking, teambuilding, diversity and so many other corporate buzzwords; I promise we did actually have some fun too.  On Wednesday, the camp went mobile as we hiked the three kilometers into town looking for the village soccer pitch that we had heard about earlier.  The idea for this afternoon was to have a “Community Development” exercise where anyone from town was invited to come and watch the campers and volunteers play softball.  The catch to all this was that none of the campers had ever played softball, let alone knew the rules.  Fortunately, one of my colleague PCVs was up to the task of coaching them.  The afternoon was absolutely perfect, a golden moment, the exact type of event you might picture to be quintessentially Peace Corps.  The weather was absolutely perfect, great temperature, bright sunshine with the occasional fluffy white cloud floating by.  At one point we even had five minutes of light misty rain that we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.  Rolling hillsides, dotted with trees and cows, set our scenic background; we worked through the frustration of teaching the campers a new American game and it paid off big time, they absolutely loved it.  After an initial hour of tossing the ball around, practicing swings and having a quick mock game, it was show time.  Children and adults started to show up by the dozens, filing the bleachers and lining up along the chain link fence.  Our camp’s program manager is apparently a DJ or something by day, because he brought a legit speaker set with a microphone and served as our announcer throughout the whole event; introducing the game to the crowd, calling all of the plays, and encouraging extra hustle.  The only things that could have made this day better are American hot dogs and cold beer.  After the game is when the real magic started to happen.  The crowd was encouraged to come out on to the field and give the game a try themselves.  What’s amazing is that our newly trained semi-pro softball camper athletes started to have one on one lessons with members from the community; showing the proper way to hold a bat, throw a ball etc.  All things they had only learned themselves a couple hours earlier.  After it was all over, several campers mentioned to me how good it felt to be teaching someone else something; it was a feeling I told them to focus on and to remember.