Eventually, everyone got up and either showered or went to breakfast, I stayed in bed, resting my eyes for as long as possible before getting up to shower myself. Packed my bag, then had breakfast, I had weetbix with sugar, and milk of course. We then had to move all our luggage out of our rooms so the cleaners could come and clean up before the youth arrive, meaning we slept in dirty rooms/beds...that explains the dirty shower...
We had another meeting, outlining the days events and what was to come, such as who was going to be in our cabins, then had our own little meetings in our groups before mingling around before the youth arrived! I got an sms from my sister saying the bus driver didn't know where our location was, which was both worrying and comforting, because we (leaders) needed time to prepare stuff.
At some time, after 11am, the first bus (from Cabramatta) arrived, with a van leading the way. Once again the leaders rushed onto the balcony to wave our hands, yell at the bus (I don't think they could hear us) and just get excited. We tried to get the bus to honk its horn like last year but that didn't come to fruition, I blame the lack of horn pulling action by us and the driver who didn't like fun (note: he may have liked fun, I just can't confirm). We welcome the kids and have them proceed to register, paying and receiving their name tag. Eventually the second bus (from Hurstville) came, and that bus also failed to honk its horn, meaning we had a SYC with no bus horn!
We mingled with all the kids while they registered, getting to know them and all. I was looking for the kids in my cabin, who were from Hurstville, a change from last year where I had Cabra kids, and things were fairly easy as I had a co-leader with me. But due to the large number of youth this year, many leaders had to go solo, so to say anxious and nervous would be quite a feat for a toddler, and thats what I felt like (anxious and nervous).
I found my youth and had them bring their luggage to our room, thinking about what to say, what they thought of me, suprised I had one more youth than planned and hoping they weren't crazy troublemakers. They turned out fine, or so I thought, but more about that tonight...
We all gathered together to go through the rules of the place as told by our Youthworks friend Tom, then other orientation type things to get through and before you knew it, it was lunch time, which was bread rolls, with either sliced ham or sliced chicken with salad and all that healthy stuff. I had two!
Following lunch was "Get to know you" games, so the youth could get to know each other, the games were "Name Name", where you call out a persons name twice to avoid being whacked with a pillow, "Build-up scissors/paper/rock", where you play until there's two people left to determine the champion, "Big wind blows", a variation of the fruit salad concept, "Bang", a game involving shooting each other, "Get to know your leaders", a game for each cabin to ask their leaders as many questions as they want, the strangest question I got was "Do you own a fridge?" and finally "Name Bingo", a more active version of Bingo involving interests, rather than numbers. Of course there's more to these games than my brief descriptions but I just wanted to keep things short.
Also of note is that Monday was hot, so at some point during these games we took a break so kids wouldn't get suffocated or melt inside the hall. After the "Get to know you" games it was time for Wide Games (the games you play outside), but due to the extreme heat we had to do a bit of re-planning and temporarily cancel Wide Games and play some of our Evening Activity games in its place. We played "Construction!", a game involving a lot of newspaper, we broke up into 8 teams and our aim was to construct a free-standing building made out of newspaper and tape that could fit our team, or as much of our team as possible, and we would be awarded points based on how many people we could fit.
This is an example of how successful you can be with good design, fitting your whole team together, making them feel like part of a refugee camp (their joke, not mine).
And this is an example of what happens when you have bad design, a last minute rush to save it, resulting in an absolute collapse, leaving you to salvage whats left and earning as many points as you possibly now can...
Having now trashed a few rooms with newspaper everywhere we retreated back to the hall to announce the winners, then we had free time until dinner at 6pm. We had chinese food, well, as chinese as Australians can get it...we had some beef dish (mongolian?) or a chicken dish with rice, hard rice though. Being hungry I had beef first, then for seconds got both beef and chicken, and skipped out on dessert because I was too full.
Stay tuned for Part 2, coming when I write it. It's gonna be a looong series....
Stay tuned for Part 2, coming when I write it. It's gonna be a looong series....
