During OLP this year, I was placed in a group with Ben, Max, Rohan, Finn, Xander, Justine, Jasmine, Sophie, Cerys, Isabel, Christie, Ryan, Kim and Andy. During year 9 camp, I had to overcome many challenges but through teamwork I was able to overcome all of them.
Tent Groups
At the start of camp, we were told to pick out our tent groups, I went with Andy because this way we could have only 2 people in our tent whereas other groups had 3. We did this because there wasn’t much space in our tents. I didn’t really know Andy very well at the start of camp, but using the ASC capability of effective communication, I got to know him better and now we are great friends. He often made the tent alone because I was either getting food or cleaning up the campsite.
Teamwork
Throughout camp we did many activities that were designed to make us work as a team and collaborate with each other effectively. The most memorable game we played was a game of volleyball but with a twist, around 6 people were holding a tarp and we had to play volleyball.
I was the person coordinating our group’s movement and I led by team to victory as we won by 7 on our first round and we only lost by 2 on the second round. I had to tell my group when to crouch and when to push the tarp up to get maximum air time on the ball.
Cooking
Something we had to do every night was cooking. After we were put into our cooking group, we had to decide on what roles all of us would play in our group (I had Max and Ben). I was going to be the head chef, Ben was going to cut all of our ingredients and Max was going to go get the ingredients and the spices. This required effective communication and collaboration because I needed to rely on my team to get me quality ingredients because we were going to have to eat everything we cooked.
Hiking
Another part of camp that was challenging was the hiking aspect. Since we were in group 3, we were hiking everyday, because we had to go to a different campsite every night. This required resilience , as packing down our sleeping bag and tents , packing bags and hiking to a completely different campsite each night became tiring pretty fast, but resilience and collaborating with my peers helped me through it.