This one time, at RYLA (the rest of it)

And this is the rest of it... I got some speech notes which is a mk2 of the intro... but like all my writing, it's all over the place. So you ain't gonna see it. And although I thought I might as well cut back on the posting of each day... it seems like the amount of writing I did for each day became less and less, either because I got tired of it, or those days had less stuff crammed into it.

Wednesday: Lazy day

Sleep in

Oh precious sleep. Being relieved of carrying the stretcher and sent to fill up the remaining seats of the bus to go back to camp meant dibs on the bunks in the dorm. Being scrawny does have its perks. Since all the guys had to carry the stretcher, and a few of us were relieved of this duty, we got to pick the good bunks- in the corner away from heavy traffic, and shelves! MUAHAHHAHA I could finally unpack my stuff and not in a ready to go state.

And we got to sleep in til 12pm.

Values walk

This was just a look inside yourself and determine what are your values activity. There were just a bunch of hypothetical scenarios and how would you respond, such as reporting a fellow athlete for performance enhancing substance abuse, doing the same as him, punishing a child, and dealing with illegal immigrants. There were a lot more scenarios, but we got bogged down on these. I would have liked to gone through the other scenarios.

Games night

As though we haven’t been having enough fun- we had a games night, where we had to compete with the other groups to complete a quiz/random acts thing. Man, the facilitators would help us if we did favours for them, like bringing them coffee (precious stimulating caffeine) or giving them a backrub. The end result- a 5 way DRAW!

Oh, one of the random acts we had to do was a scene from a movie. Tip: battle scenes involve the entire group, and not a lot of lines are said. We did Braveheart. Well, bits and pieces of it pieced together- “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” *flash kilts* *fight*

This was also the start of The Nuggets’ use of funny accents.

Thursday: quiet day

Leadership Panel

We had guest speakers come in to talk to us about… LEADERSHIP. Well, actually we had following your goals, inspiration and finding a mentor, communication, and some other random blabbering. I’m afraid that a lot of us were zoning out since we were sleep deprived for the past few days. However, some parts of the speeches did sink in and had an impact on us.

Adventure Journey

This was fun. The adventure journey was a series of puzzle games that tested the teamwork, leadership and problem solving abilities of our small groups. Each puzzle had about 10 minutes for it to be completed.

First puzzle- the spiderweb. We had to pass all eight of us through the gaps in a net. Pretty difficult since each gap could only be used once, and you couldn’t touch the edges of the rope. And we killed the net by trying to dive through it. Oops. I think our game plan for this was to get the coordinated and stronger people through first, so that they could support the heavier and larger people from the other side, followed by the lightest. That was a very slow process. And Rachel was always eager to go next, taking her loose top off and having to put it back on because someone else would go through. “We don’t mind you taking your top off!” Why do I open my mouth…

The swinging rope was quite easy. Get all 8 of us to swing on a rope and land on a tiny space… and stay there. We had to huddle up in order to fit on that tiny rug, and Tim did not like the intimacy of it.

I don’t want to know what the groups before us did with the pipe with holes. We had to fill a big leaky pipe with water and grab a rubber ducky. Since it was leaky with holes, we had to block the holes with whatever part of our body- including our tongue.

The walk of doom, was a puzzle much like one in Broken Sword. There was a grid, and you could only walk on a defined path, which is not marked. Slow and steady wins the race for this. Well, only after you rush through it to determine which squares are safe to step on, and mark with minty wrappers.

The Towers of Hanoi type puzzle was one I am proud of, as the Nuggets were the only group to actually solve it. And it was tricky as there were 4 to each side instead of the usual 3, and we were the puzzle pieces. It’s a lot harder to solve a puzzle from that view point, and also when everyone wants to do the directing. Who’s the genius who decided to step back and plan the manoeuvres before actually doing it? Me! Mind you, I couldn’t figure out how to do it with 4 a side, but my initiative to get everyone to step back and plan (using our shoes to represent us on the pathway) got it solved.

RYLA Photo

Here we found out I was the shortest guy at camp. -_-"

Rotary Dinner

I couldn’t find my sponsoring Rotary official to have dinner with, so I leeched onto Jenni R’s. Learnt a bit about how Rotary clubs are organised and what they do. Hehehe- Fork and knife Rotarians are those who just attend the Rotarian dinners and not take part. And apparently there are other youth and leadership related programs organised by Rotary and Rotaract, but RYLA is the best and for the best. That made me feel really good about myself. And you can see that the RYLArians were either really good people that oozed with confidence and leadership traits, or were strong in other fields and have the personal growth potential.

Sarah, Tim and I went around doing evil glare faces. Heheheh

After the Rotary officials left, majority of us started messing around having fun and dancing, with the minority taking up the slack and cleaning up the hall. Good fun. No sleep for many of us tonight.

Friday: Zombie day

Wakeup call

I’m pretty sure it was today, otherwise it would have been Thursday. We were woken up to a refreshing change. Sweet Home Alabama. No more Shine! WOOHOO!

We later found out it was one of the Rotarians who hid the CD.

Blur

We were all bloody tired, and many of us could not concentrate. Trust games were cancelled because of safety concerns. Most of us went swimming instead ^^

Last night event

Let’s see… This was organised to be a talent show combined with a funny awards ceremony. Very well executed. Kudos to the guys who planned it.

For some reason, majority of the groups had a thing for cross dressing, and also for that acting where there are 2 people acting as 1 (person behind uses their hands). And worst of all, they all put managed to use Shine, in some form.

With the exception of Purple Monkey Dishwasher, I’d say our Pirates, Ninjas and Aztec Gold was the most original (in a completely plagiarised manner). PMDw was long. And had a bloody script! But Mario was hilarious with his little kid acting. He even made forgetting his lines, funny. Unlike Nathan who had to refer to his script before saying MUAHAHAHAHA!

Why was our pirate/ninja act plagiarised? We took bits from Russell Peters’ act, and Little Britain, the name Steve from Dodgeball and we used tshirt ninja masks. But it was original since we didn’t do that arms with a mind of its own, or use Shine. Plus the entire thing was relying on pirate YARR jokes.

And we pretty much made it up on the spot.

But here’s the general script:

Steve the ninja starts hearing voices in his head, much like in the schizophrenia exercise.

“You do not want to be a ninja, you want to be a pirate, go look for Aztec gold…”

“What shall I do?”

“Get a cutlass and goto the port”

So Steve goes to the sword shop. Where we then use the Russell Peters “50c is a lot of money” act, but using a British accent like from Little Britain. Tim couldn’t do a Hong Kong accent, and I couldn’t do a Japanese accent convincingly, hence him doing a weird British accent. I just kept changing the way I spoke.

Steve then joins the Pirates who then ROW to where the Aztec gold can be found. Crack a few YARR jokes. Steve cracks a dodgy one.

Then the Ninjas confront the Pirates to get Steve back, because he left the Ninja order. Instead of fighting, they end up “debating” with the Pirates coming out superior because they have “oarsome” pirate jokes.

The Pirates find the treasARRR, but it’s gone… time for another adventchARR!

No soup rest for you!

More dancing tonight. I showed my eagerness to learn, ignoring how embarrassing I am, and tried copying, observing, doing whatever. Unlike Tim and Angela who stood around, and did not try. No game.

Since it was the last night we would all be together, some of us stayed up for as long as we could physically muster. We actually did that on Thursday night as well, hence the zombiness during the day.

Saturday: last day

Affirmations/Warm Fuzzies

Throughout the week, we were supposed to be writing warm fuzzies for everyone. Warm fuzzies, are… warm fuzzy positive comments. And affirmations are, pretty much the same, except more personal, I guess. Everybody in the small groups give affirmations for each other on cassette (which I now converted to MP3… don’t trust that ancient technology… quality can degrade) so basically, we can listen to it anytime for a morale boost. Basically what we all said to each other was what we thought of them throughout camp, how they performed and their growth, advice, and anything funny or meaningful. It was a very touching moment. You don’t get this kind of feedback in reality, and this is really positive. After all, you can’t maintain growth if you keep getting cut down.

Farewell

We kind of ran overtime with the affirmations. So before we knew it, it was closing ceremony, and home.

We were going back into reality.

Thanks for letting me share this amazing experience with you, and thanks for putting up with my dodgy writing. I had no idea which audience I was going to cater to so.. .yeah... (It was originally meant to be just a hard copy of what I remembered for myself, so it would have been pretty much full of coarse language)