Perpetual Change

Flat Stanley VI – Scout camp

August 16, Wednesday
Today was sunny!! And we’ll go to camp tomorrow. This morning, John did his remodeling with Yury’s tools. Then we checked the Internet; John posted to his online Journal.

Then we went to meet another friend. In a town that has a movie theater. We missed the movies but the town has a lot of resorts in the mountains so we walked through the craft bazaar and then through the big park in the center of town. We went to a big grocery store and bought a picnic lunch and then ate in the park by a violin player. We even saw one of the squirrels with puffy ears.
Then we went to see a Chinese movie called “the Promise.” It was a bit strange and all in Russian so a bit hard to understand. More movies are in Ukrainian now than before but still very few. Then we went home and packed.

August 17, Thursday
We got up, cleaned John’s apartment, and met all the people going to camp this morning at 9 am. We are going to Plast camp. Plast means scout in Ukrainian. The Ukrinian scouts were started in 1911, the same time as American scouts but during the Soviet Union they were an outlawed organization because they teach democracy and national pride. During that time they were very active in the Diaspora. There are Ukrainian scouts in 7 countries in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia.

We are at camp with just the scouts from John’s city, and only the younger or newer scouts. Some of the older ones help with planning and teaching at camp.
We loaded a big bus with all our stuff, food and equipment. Since I couldn’t help with the carrying, John packed me away so I wouldn’t get hurt. It took us about an hour and when I got out of his backpack, we were just inside a nature preserve, in the mountains in a big field. We unloaded everything, had a snack and then listened to Olesia, who is the camp director. She explained all the rules and how to stay safe. Then we set up our tents and it got very hot out. Then we did camp tasks. One group dug holes near the kitchen to throw food scraps. One group dug a pit and lined it with stones for the kitchen fire. One group looked for wood for the fire, and the last group made the latrine. A latrine is an outdoor toilet. I helped this group. Last year John said they had a deep hole with two platforms to stand on and squat between like I saw with Virginia and Mark in Crimea. But this year, out of wood and rope, we made a kind of seat like this. There was even a holder for toilet paper, and a sink and soap outside the door. In the evening they throw the fire ashes and coals on top, and it really doesn’t stink much.

There is also something like a wall around it. They hang strings from the trees around it horizontally and then hang new branches with leaves to make it like a wall that they braid together, so it looks like a green screen.

They cook everything over a wood fire. Sometimes it takes a long time, but they build a pit with something to hang over the fire so that they can build a bigger fire and the wind won’t bother it. [editor’s note: there were illustrations of these things in the original journal that went to Chicago.]

All this was a lot of hard work (tying knots, chopping wood, and digging holes,), so then we had a little snack. After that, some cooked dinner and some went for more wood, and then we ate a hot dinner. Then everyone put on their scout uniforms or traditional Ukrainian clothes, and we had a ceremony with some scouts songs, prayers, and the Ukrainian flag (which is blue on top to represent the sky and yellow underneath, just two big stripes, which represents fields of wheat, or good earth.). This was the official opening of the camp and the closing of the day. Then we played a game to get to know each other and then sat by the fire, sang songs and relaxed. They also explained how two people would keep watch all night in case of bears or people intruders. It was dark at this point, and it had gotten really cold, and we all went straight to sleep because we were very tired (it was also 11 o’clock). John and I didn’t have to keep watch. Our turn is tomorrow night.

August 18, Friday
Today we got up and had ruhanka, which means morning exercises. Then breakfast and then there was lessons – cooking, camp project building, knot tying and commands/marching. Then we went for lunch but it wasn’t quite ready so some of us went to look for more wood. We were afraid it was going to rain. Lunch was soup and rice with canned meat. It was really tasty.
Then we had an hour free time, and then we did the rest of the camp gadgets – flagpole, kitchen table, gateway, and fence. The gate is cool The name of the camp is “horizons” this year (it is different every year) and it looks like a rising sun of wood branches with the word spelled out in leaves below it.

We also made an announcement board with only rope and sticks. I took my picture with it. Then we had meetings with our small groups; these groups are all girls or boys the same age, but all come together for camp. Some new boys arrived and we helped them put up their tent. Then we closed the day with the flag ceremony on our new flagpole and had dinner.

After dinner we had some practice singing. The scouts sing a morning and evening prayer and tomorrow we will do it at church because it is a big holiday. We aren’t far from a small town that we will march into.

Then rain began. But it wasn’t too cold and it wasn’t hard. So we had our campfire in the kitchen under the cover. We talked about what it means to be a scout, how we all take care and support each other. John was a scout for a long time in the USA before Ukraine. He also worked at a scout camp in England and went to the world Jamboree (a big campout) in Thailand.
Then we decided who would stand guard. I am writing now in the middle of the night. We had from 3-4 am. It is clear, not too cold and tons of stars are out. And now it’s time to sleep some more.

August 19, Saturday
Today is a holiday called Spassa. It is always the 19th of August and it is very old, before Christianity. But now people celebrate it at church. They bring apples and other fruit that have just ripened and then new honey for the priest to bless. They bring these things in baskets with fresh flowers and at the end of the church service they line all the baskets up and the priest blesses them with holy water.

We got up, ate quickly and walked (or marched) into town to the church. We got there a bit late but our two lines of scouts squeezed into the church. We were all in our uniforms and often women stand on the left and men on the right at church and that is how we stood in our lines. When the people of the church knelt, we stood at attention.

After church some people wanted to take pictures with us. It is not often that you see a whole group of young people (or any age) dressed in traditional clothes, and it makes people very patriotic to see it.

Then we walked back to camp and had ice cream on the way. It had been very hot in the church and it was hot on the way back too. When we got back, we had a short break and then ate the blessed apples as a snack. You have to bless yourself before you eat and they make the sign of the cross in the Orthodox way, from the right to the left.

Then the girls cooked lunch, the boys played sports and the few boys who came last night had review of what we had already learned. Then we all played Frisbee before lunch. At lunch, I played and ate with some of the younger boys. The weather was great. Then we had lessons for the boys and the girls bathed, and then we switched. We studied cartography and health. We bathed with heated water at the small river. Then the boys did some leadership/teamwork games with John and the girls cooked.

After dinner, we quickly built a fire while the girls cleaned up and we sand songs and did skits by the fire. The boys kept watch that night but John and I didn’t have to.

August 20, Sunday
We didn’t go to church this morning because we had gone yesterday, but a more senior leader did have a discussion about doing good deeds and living a moral life. John did yoga and stretching for the morning exercises. They weren’t sure what this was and some liked it and some didn’t.

Later in the morning we had more lessons. Marching and singing. Then we had lunch; it was the older boys turn to cook and John is one of their leaders so we helped, but then they took John to help the girls gather wood. They gathered so much!! Some of the boys were cooking for the first time and are 15 or 16. Boys don’t normally do much in the kitchen here.

After lunch we tried to play Ultimate Frisbee but that wasn’t too successful. Then we had a scavenger hunt which was great fun. If anyone asked John to borrow something he would give them a task first like standing on their head or singing or making beards out of shaving cream.

At dinner time, they took John again to help build the camp fire, but after he helped do dishes since he hadn’t cooked. I almost forgot! They had an egg drop competition. The containers were very creative and nice looking but all the eggs broke. They liked the game very much. After dinner, we washed the dishes very quickly but rain started. It rained hard but only for half an hour and the fire was built so well that it still lit. So we still had our campfire with just a few short rain sprinkles but then the stars came out at the end. The campfire was like a call-in Radio Show. The theme was the Ukrainian language. Many people that live in Ukraine and are Ukrainian can’t speak the language. It is the official language but in some regions, including the capital, Kyiv, Russian is the language most people speak. And since most Ukrainians understand Russian and more people around the world speak Russian, many books, movies and most music and TV even by Ukrainian artists and companies are in Russian which make the problem worse. It was an interesting discussion.

Again we didn’t have to keep watch so I slept well. It rained a bit through the night.

August 21, Monday
This morning was the boys last turn to cook (at least for 2 days) and they made very tasty rice porridge with fresh apples. Porridge and tea are very popular here; coffee too and for lunch soup. This is how most people get fluids. They don’t drink much water and if they do, it is usually carbonated. They do like stewed fruit juice called compote. It is still not recommended to drink water straight from the tap so all of these ways are safer because you boil the water.
After breakfast and dishes we had more lessons – camping, cartography, signaling, and then we worked a little on camp while the younger boys cooked. We gathered more wood, fixed the steps down to the river and up to the toilet and so on.

After lunch we had a free half hour to rest and then we played a game called orienteering. In teams, we had to run through the woods with map and compass looking for flags that John had hidden in the morning. In Ukrainian it is called a fox run. It took 2.5 hours and it was very fun. Sometimes the markers were hidden near streams or trails or on hill tops but we had a map that told us where they all were.

Then we had dinner. The counselors had cooked most of it for us already. Then we had a small campfire where just the boys were (the girls had their own) and we talked about what Plast (the Ukrainian scouts) means to each of us.
We had to keep watch this night but it went quickly.

Tuesday, August 22
We had been so tired from watch and everything yesterday that they let us sleep in an extra hour. It was very nice. We got up for the flag ceremony. Then we had breakfast, packed some supplies and lunch and went on a 7 km hike. They measure everything in kilometers here. We hiked over the mountain ridge to our south and came to the village of Urich which has a huge rock outcropping where once stood a fortress of wood with 23 floors! The big stones are pretty impressive but you can also still see the steps and walls that they built right into the stone and the drawings of what it once looked like were very impressive. The Ukrainian government wants to rebuild it but it would be very expensive. They have a small museum that was also interesting.

Then we had lunch and were going to leave, but a big rainstorm came with lots of lightning so we waited in a picnic pavilion until it had passed. We played some games like broken telephone. Then we hiked back.

When we got back over the mountain, there was hail on the ground in the woods! The closer we got to camp, the more there was. In camp there were piles of it. The size of pebbles! The camp leader had stayed in camp and said the weather had been very bad. We had a snack, cleaned up and put on WARM, dry clothes. The temperature had dropped a lot, even though the sun had come out. We cooked dinner, chopped wood and made a structure to dry clothes.

We had been on the hike a long time, and it took awhile to cook and clean up after dinner so we didn’t have a fire. We just built up the kitchen fire, sang a few songs, and went to bed. It was cold but not too bad.

Wednesday, August 23,
It was cold and everyone was tired this morning so John made us run for morning exercises and then we played a very active game of Simon says.
Then we had flags and breakfast and it warmed up a bit. Then we played a game where each person had to continue a story after repeating the last sentence of the person before. It was a very interesting story. Plast uses games to teach different skills, and we did this one to work on really listening to each other.

Then our groups broke up to make camp gadgets. It was a competition and it took everyone a very long time. The older boys had been working on stairs to the larine (the ground had got very muddy and slippery from all the rain and foot traffic). Then they built a place to hang everyone’s bowls and cups. The girls built a huge bench and the younger boys built small benches and a place to hang everyone’s spoons and forks.

Then it was the older boys’, my group’s turn to cook again. We made pea soup, boiled potatoes and meats and a fruit drink. The drink is thick, almost like jello but hot, and pink! It was very strange, but everyone likes it a lot and said they have it at home too.

Then we cleaned up from lunch using all our new camp contraptions and had more lessons – signals, songs, marching, and emergency preparedness. When they want everyone’s attention they blow a whistle (which they do a lot) and everyone has to run to attention, either in a line or a circle. The program director is the one that whistles and calls out these commands, but at marching today, others got to try and she stood in the line and disobeyed like everyone else usually does. It was funny but we learned our lesson.

Next we had some guests arrive. Everyone was very excited to see them. They were older Plast members who had been at another camp for more advanced skills.

Our group made dinner. We are called “Grated Cakes” which is another name for Deruny or potato pancakes. Everyone says we cook the best. We cleaned up rather slowly and then had a campfire with a skit and a lot of songs that our guests sang.

August 24, Thursday.
Я вітаю тобі з днем незалежності! “I wish you a good Independence day!” Today is the 15th anniversary of Ukraine’s Independence from the Soviet Union. It is a big state holiday here and there is usually a concert in the town’s main square and sometimes fireworks.

We had to cook breakfast this morning. It was a little slow. Then in the morning, we had more lessons – first aid, art, astronomy, and nature. We learned lots of interesting things. Then we gathered a ton of wood, and had lunch. Next we played a game where each group had to form Ukrainian letters. It was very funny; they read us a little history about the Cyrillic alphabet that Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Macedonian and a few other languages use. Then there was some time where we went around to all the counselors and showed them what we knew. They would sign off in our books, so that we could get the next advancement. Then the younger boys went to cook and the older boys built the fire. The fire program was about Ukrainian politics and culture. It was fun.

August 25, Friday
This morning we woke everyone up with an alarm. It is an emergency situation when the person on watch blows the “SOS” and everyone must get up very quickly. We then told them that there was a monster attacking our camp, split them into two groups and told them that the monster had to have 3 heads, 5 arms, 6 legs and be able to move. They had to form such a monster with their team. It was funny. After flags and breakfast we had more classes on First Aid and singing.

Then John and I left because the Peace Corps director from Kyiv was coming to meet us and some others for lunch. We went into the next town, had a good pizza lunch and the director drove us back be cause she was interested in seeing camp. The campers had washed clothes and showered while we were gone and were having lunch when we got back. She liked camp very much but couldn’t stay.

Then we had more time where we could show the counselors what we had learned and they could sign off. Then the boys built a big fire for later and we played some race and teamwork games. After dinner, we had some trouble getting the fire going but it was a fun campfire with songs and games and it was very big!!

August 26, Saturday
Today when we got up, no one was here! The boys on watch went to wake the program director and she wasn’t there, so they went to the camp director and she was gone too, then they found that all the adults were gone except for the guy who looks after the food and equipment. At first we thought we should just go back to sleep but then we decided to get things going, so we appointed campers to different positions and had morning exercises, the flag ceremony and breakfast. Then we cleaned up and decided to have lessons. We chose first aid and songs and found books in the counselors’ tents that could help.
In the middle of the second lesson, they came out of the woods. They looked a bit wet and dirty and said they had been kidnapped. They said we were very good for having done everything. We knew it was kind of like a test and asked why they had come back so soon!

So we finished our lessons and then had more time to show the counselors our skills. It was rainy and cold now, but then after lunch the weather got very nice. We had a game like Jeopardy that reviewed all we had done. The girls won by a lot. Then we had an environmental lesson and an art lesson. We did friendship bracelets in the one and Marta who had been at the environmental camp last week , taught a bit of what she had learned which was the first part of the project we had designed at that camp. Finally we began to take down some of the camp structures like the gateway and benches.

It was the boys turn to cook today. We had made borsht for lunch and the cooking counselor was evaluating our skills. For dinner we made boiled potatoes with meat and fried onions and carrots. It was good. The young boys built the last campfire. It was also big. We had some trouble getting it lit too; it had rained again in the afternoon, but the fire was bright and hot and looked like a giant candle. We talked and played games about what we had learned about each other and what we liked about camp. We also sang a lot. It was the camp secretary’s birthday and she requested a lot of songs. Her mom had come at lunch and brought a very delicious cake that her grandma had made.
John told us a story about how he had gone looking in the morning for a marker from the fox run that no one had found (and the secretary had really wanted). He gave it to her as a birthday present but then he told a story about how he had gone out alone, tired, without a map or compass, and it was foggy; he had stopped paying as much attention and he went back a little bit to the wrong direction. When he realized, he was FAR away (like 20 minutes walking), luckily he knew where he was and found his way back easily, but it was still foolish and dangerous and he said even with experience you should be careful and follow the rules; they are there for a reason.

Then we all went to sleep; it was hard because we were excited, since it was the last night. Then when we had been asleep an hour, they blew the whistles again!! Ugh, it was another alarm, and this time we needed our uniforms. They had put candles out and we had a ceremony for a camper and counselor who had achieved the next level of advancement. It was cool but we were tired and we quickly went back to sleep.

Sunday, August 27
Today we got up, had exercises, breakfast and all, then packed everything up; first filling in the kitchen and latrine, then taking down the tarps, supply tent, flagpole and finally our tents. The weather was nice and then we had the closing camp ceremony. We all got T-shirts, certificates of our accomplishments, and patches to put on our uniform. I got one too. It is black and white and says “обрії” which means horizons, and then “(town’s name) 2006” at the bottom and “(town’s name)’s troop training education camp” around the top. Then we had watermelon and Helepa which is like trail mix with sweet condensed milk. It is a Plast tradition and very tasty. We can try it at home: half cup chopped, dried apricots, cup chopped unsalted peanuts, big Hershey bar broken into very small pieces (or a cup of chocolate chips – they don’t have them here), 2 cups of sweet crackers (like graham crackers) broken up, and a can of condensed milk.
Then we loaded the bus, and sang all the way home. We unloaded the bus at the Plast building. Then we all went home. We talked about going to the next village because a famous Ukrainian poet/writer was born there 150 years ago, named Ivan Franko, and the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, was there for the big celebration but John and I were so tired. We unpacked, cleaned up and packed all my things because I have to leave tomorrow. It’s been great fun, and I’ll be sorry to leave Ukraine, but I can’t wait to see Eartis and tell him of all my adventures.

“Stanley,
It has been a lot of fun having you stay with me! Good luck to you and Eartis on your future adentures. Have fun,
John Sheetz”

posted by jjs @ 8:33 AM