Camp 2024

My camp diary

Day 6

It was around 2:30am when I discovered Klara’s real reason for sending me off on the hike yesterday…there was a raid planned for tonight! Hlídka did their job and woke EVERYONE up when someone snuck in trying to steal the flag.

I got up with everyone else, headed to the jidelna and discovered that the first raider had been captured. Maruška was busy tying him up and despite arguments and attempts to escape, she got him successfully tied to a table and headed off to help capture more. Half asleep, they left him with me and I spent what felt like an eternity holding onto the knots keeping him tied to the table as he was trying to untie them. While this happened, others were being captured and brought back. By this point, the process had been somewhat streamlined - the bigger kids were capturing people and bringing them back to the jidelna to be managed by the Svetlusky, who were trying to figure out how to tie them to the tables. So much credit goes to the two girls from the other camp who were part of this. Our Svetlusky were frustrated trying to figure out how to get them tied up at the other girls were encouraging them to try thier knots and get them tied up.

Needless to say, 2 minutes later, the girls had untied themselves and were sitting there untied, so I told the little girls that they should keep checking that they were still tied up. The retying commenced but soon the girls were untied again and slowly sauntered out of the jidelna…it was fun to watch but I was so tired. Everyone eventually was caught and I was able to head back to sleep where I had absolutely no problem falling back to sleep.

In the morning, we slept in and when everyone did get up, it was begrudgingly. The forecast is also overcast and rainy which is a huge change when compared to the (wonderful) scorching heat of the past few days. Our captors had slept in the pantheon tent and stayed for awhile in the morning.

At Nastup this morning, we started in on the challenges. Terka and Bětuška are blind today for the day without sight or blindness challenge and Bara B. and Lida are doing the foreign language challenge in english! Kája is doing her Světlušky challenge of 6 hours in the woods alone.

After breakfast, we played the 20 questions game, “baseball” style. Basically, everyone had a category of questions (mine was North America) and we went from one tribe to the next where each kid had to choose a question category and how hard it was from 1 to 4 points. They had “bases” and if they got the question right, they moved to that base. Anyone who was already on those bases got to move forward. This was a great rainy day game and the kids had fun. We had topics like mine, First Aid, Sports, The Village of Sebetov and Fairy Tales. Funny enough, the two most popular were First Aid and Fairy Tales by far. We did have a few intrepid kids who attempted the North America questions. Ondra was the first one and I remember it well. The question was “What is the oldest National Park in US?” Ondra didn’t know but we encouraged him to guess and he guessed Yellowstone, which was right. It encouraged other kids to try the category and also to guess if they didn’t know.

The sun came out for the afternoon and so we headed out into the field to compete in an Olympiad arranged by Vorvaň. We had 10 stations scattered around the field, each of which required a different activity which was somehow measured. Each activity was managed by a different adult, rover or ranger.

Long Jump - Honza
Arrow Shooting - Vorvaň
Obstacle Course - Piškot
Slipper Walk - Jitka
Stilts - Kejmi
Blindfolded airplanes - Kika
Running around camp - Tomáš
Tomahawk Throwing - Profa
Spear Throwing - Neptun
Log Rolling - Me!

For the purposes of measuring, we split the kids up into two groups: Světlušky + Vlčata and Skauts. The game was very popular and worked in such a way that everyone was good at something. It was great to see that even the kids who were blind for the day were participating and even Terka managed to do really well on the stilts despite the blindfold. A perfect lesson in why to include those with disabilities in games, too.

A bit of drama unfolded during the games because apparently Adam had taken The Ring of Power from the LOTR Monopoly game and was wearing it. He’d been told not to lose it!!! but decided to wear it through the Olympiad. Needless to say, it came off when he was log rolling with me and so spend much of the time of the Olympiad trying to find it in the grass while I was trying to keep the logs rolling! Some of the other Skauts came to help which made things more difficult (and, I have to admit, entertaining) but eventually everything was fine. The ring was found, returned to the game box and everyone was told in no uncertain terms that the ring cannot be worn and can only come out for playing the game! Ring of Power, indeed.

Everyone was still pretty tired this evening after the ambush from the night before so things remained low-key and everyone went to bed early. Before bed, I played some games. The first with Leni, while Kejmi was managing her braids, called Duch. It was fun. Basically, there are 5 different tokens on the table between us, each a different color and a different item: white ghost, blue book, red chair, grey mouse and green bottle. There was a deck of cards and one card would be turned over. At that point, you had to choose one of the tokens based on the card. The right one would either be exactly like the token (i.e. a blue book) or which color and/or object was missing. For example, you might have a RED GHOST and a WHITE CHAIR and a GREEN MOUSE and a GREY BOTTLE and so the correct answer would be the blue book. You had to be the first to touch it. It was surprisingly tricky - your brain REALLY has a hard time separating out the objects from the colours.

Next, I played a flag game with Ondra, Kejmi and Neptun. Basically, everyone has a handful of cards with country flags on them and we go around in a circle. You have to guess which country a flag belongs to on a card that belongs to someone else. The goal is to collect the most cards. Needless to say, I do NOT know many European and North American flags. Another highlight of the evening was that Ondra asked me if I knew what the Stars and Stripes on the American flag meant! I was happy to explain to him that I did but definitely had to learn some new words. While I knew stars (hvězda), I had no idea how to say colonies (kolonie) or stripes (pruh)!