This one time at RYLA... (day 1 cont & day 2)

Tent
This is the first activity involving all 40 of us. We found out the meaning of “too many cooks spoil the broth”. Well, it was quite hilarious. We didn’t have enough tent poles, and made it worse when some people decided to use the poles to peg down the tent walls, on an angle. Then we had to make a 2nd tent. More improvisation, using a log as a centre pole, and rope tied around every tree that surrounded the tent. Talk about risk management, it was risk central. Oh, it didn’t make things easier with the fact that the facilitators took great pleasure in being “Nazis” and disabling people by blindfolding, muting or tying up their hands.

RLQ
Rotary Leadership Qualities are lectures, no questions asked. You can’t hide the fact that we are sitting in a room listening to a facilitator speak about the elements to leadership and looking at a projector screen. There were also activities that demonstrated the theory covered.
We would have one or two RLQs a day.

Tunnels
The tunnels are a maze of concrete pipes laid out on the ground and covered in dirt. That’s right, artificial tunnels.
I would say the tunnelling activity was more about taking on a challenge rather than building teamwork and leadership. However, there was still a leader who would determine which direction to go and at what pace, as well as negotiating traffic with other groups. In the tighter adventure tunnel the budding adventurers had their nerves tested, with some cramping up and the others giving encouragement to get them to continue forwards.

Showers
After the tunnels, everybody wanted to go shower as we were covered in mud and sweat. Tim ran off to the showers so that he could beat the crowd. He also beat the roll call. The missing number 24 became famous for the rest of the week.

Monday: Day 2
The rude awakening
Being woken up at 5am, after about 4-5 hours of sleep, to the sound of Shine by Shannon Noll at max volume was not a pleasant experience. By Saturday, I think we all went insane. And breakfast was 1 hour late. We were not happy.

Abseiling
Abseiling… what can I say? I’d say about 20 of us took the buses to some place which used to be a quarry. There we met Yuri, who showed us the ropes on how to abseil. Nothing too special about abseiling. Except I was determined to go crazy going down since I chickened out on abseiling in primary school and regretted that since. So basically, I was facing my previous fear of heights. That wasn’t too hard as I was already determined to overcome it. Or simply because the approach to the top of the quarry face did not reveal the height. Probably it was all mind over matter. A lot of these tasks required mental strength to overcome fears and break comfort zones.

Rafting/Crates
If I had known Monday would be a really hot day, I would have signed up for rafting first and then abseiling. This is because rafting had limited numbers for Monday only whereas abseiling was either a Monday or Tuesday activity. Rafting involved the group to split into 3 teams and building a raft from limited materials. I was told the team that only used two barrels instead of three won because they were lighter. However, they were pretty much submerged under water.

The crates activity just brought nightmares back to me. A few weeks earlier I was playing Broken Sword for Xbox. And that game was filled with crate puzzles. Every area you went, you had to shift crates to get access to a door, window, grate, trapdoor, you name it. In this activity, we had to stack milk crates into staircase designs and climb up to whack a rubber chicken. There were 3 difficulty levels. On the easiest level, we had just enough crates to climb up on and reach the chicken. But the other 2 required us to pull apart the crate staircase and rebuild it with someone standing on top of it.

I’d say the crates activity brought out a lot of leadership, management and teamwork. This is because we needed a general overseer to watch over the whole construction, allocation of tasks such as having the tallest (Paul) to lift the crates high so that more crates could be stacked underneath, and everybody working together to make sure that the bloody safety hazard doesn’t come crashing down on top of us.

It did, by the way.