Perpetual Change

Camp I know

This environmental camp allowed me to bring two of my plast kids to the beautiful Valley of the Narcissus in the Carpathian mountains. Unfortunately, we were about two months later than the Narcissa but it was still beautiful. The camp was put on by the Environmental working group of PC volunteers here in Ukraine and they had got funding for brand knew tents. The idea was to bring 5 communities together; teach them environmental awareness; and then send them home to do a project in their communities. The lessons and kids were very interesting. In one activity, the kids were asked to pick a leader that they thought encompassed the qualities of courage, honesty, responsibility, initiative, and tolerance. Choose yours now. Their answers appear at the bottom.

You can read more about the camp in Stanley’s comments but here are a few things you won’t find there.

The tents were a copy off another company’s model and some were just slightly defective. I was a bit disappointed that some groups beat mine in putting up their tents; mine was a defective one.

When we were searching for the phone in the field (even though the girl was certain that she had put it into her bag the night before. When she noticed the phone was gone, the bag was zipped and in the back of the tent, under other bags with multiple cameras and phones), we had tell the kids to not play music on their cell phones as we searched. One counselor called the phone which had been out overnight and the rest fanned out. I almost walked right over the phone until the kids near me asked what that sound was. I had thought it was them still playing music on their phones.

Some of the counselors, when they discovered my camping experience, tried to build a fire big enough for my DISapproval one night. I didn’t think it was the best example to set, but it was built far away from almost anything, so I didn’t disapprove, though when they lit it, it turned out to be big enough to almost light a shed about 6 feet away when the wind changed direction.
The last night, they insisted about staying up late, but we wouldn’t let guys into girls’ tents. When I found one, he told me in Ukrainian that they just wanted to talk; “don’t worry – kids there won’t be,” he said.

Pope John Paul II, Robin Hood, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa, Oprah Winfrey
Pushkin, Taras Shevchenko (famous poet), Ivan Franko (famous writer), Viktor Yushenko (current president), mother/father, Zidane (French football star), grandparents, Late Pope John Paul, Oken Elzi (a rock group and major civil rights activists), Nobel, Voldymyr the Great (of the ancient Slavs), Mother Theresa, Ruslana (pop star), teacher, Julia Tymoshenko (last prime minister), Andri Shevchenko (world-famous Ukrainian football star)

posted by jjs @ 2:37 PM