Camp Banyan (entry 1 of 2)

'Awesome' would be an understatement to describe my experience at Camp Banyan.

Confession: I didn't want to go for camp.
I was homesick to begin with.
And without getting enough of my beautiful house, room and bed, I reluctantly uprooted myself and dragged my ass to camp.

Day 1: The 'Amazing Race'

In that 8 hours of finding our way to the final destination we
1. Strolled around Singapore like a bunch of slackers
2. Got off at several 'wrong' bus stops
3. Went round in BIG circles
4. Took a big fat break at Ping Zhi's (thanks babe!)

In the midst of all that, I realized what a wonderful group I had landed in.
As Gabriel so nicely accurately puts it, all of us had our different talents.
Peddie - our wonderfully efficient leader who had all the contacts. Who needs the bus guide and the street directory when you know people huh :D
Lynette - solves puzzles amazingly fast.
Francesca - is super slack and keeps the cool of our group.
Faizal - is the joker who entertains us with his crappy jokes (on gorillas and caterpillars)
John - our quiet friend who was silently behind us all the way
And of course Gabriel - who talked the most, and in many ways was the driving force of our group.

We got to our destination.
First.
On a group level, we were One Body and Many Parts.
We put the best parts of ourselves together in the problem solvings.
We led when we could, and followed a other times. We cooperated with each other.
We stood by each other. Never once did we put another down, even when anyone made any major mistakes. Instead, we came up with optimistic justifications and 'comfort-ourselves' to almost convince the one who made the mistake that it was not a mistake after all.

Day 2:
I thought from my waking moment 'I want to go home'.
Was miserable the entire morning.
When I made the decision to do just that, I was so comforted I promptly got into the mood of camp and enjoyed myself till the end of the day just before debrief.
Manny and Noel took me home.
That's a chapter of its own. But in that little chapter of my camp story, I got to know Manny a whole heap better.

Day 3:
I got back to camp after lunch in time to slack with Austin's and my group, which were paired up to be one big group.
Mark told me a very disturbing piece of history which made me think...

Day 4:
Wrote the little notes to people in the wee hours of the morning.
Near Elbow - I made a new laughing record, all thanks to Michael.
I laughed so hard tears were just flowing I felt like a bawling baby.

Noel tucked me into bed at 5am.
Woke up at 7 to begin the final day of camp.

Adrian conducted the session of camp that touched me the most.
Reflection.
3 things we learnt at camp.
2 things we wanted to change about ourselves.
1 thing we would do to bring God's affirmation to others.

I have jumbled thoughts which I will straighten out another day when I'm more awake because they are too important to me to do shabbily now for the sake of putting it up.

Thank you all for being part of my camp experience.

+ Flisha spoke @ 2:27 am

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