ok, i want to keep going at this--too much stuff is happening these days, and I want to get this wilderness camp stuff out of the way, so i can post pictures of halloween and projects and stuff! So:

Stress Camp
Day 2:

We'd been up until midnight the night before, so I felt ok about letting everyone sleep in until 8am, and nobody seemed to mind! this being the first morning, however, everyone was really sluggish, and even though we didn't eat breakfast until we'd been hiking for a bit, it still took us until about 9:30 to break camp.

The kids in the lead that day were having a hard time...well, leading, really. eventually i talked to the whole group about it. they were good about waiting for the slowest person to catch up (they never really picked up on the whole "slowest person first" thing, though), and then they would wait for the slowest people to be ready to go. the slow ones, though, were just fine sitting around as long as they were allowed to, not really realizing that the leaders were waiting for the ok from them. this meant that we'd take breaks every 30 minutes, and some of the breaks were 15 or 20 minutes long. not great progress.

every year, i end up taking the hardest, or one of the hardest, routes, totally by accident. in fact, every year i think to myself, "ok, last year was just too hard and too long. let's make things a little more enjoyable this year." when i say that to myself every year, there's a problem. i think, somehow, the group just ends up hiking far, far slower than i think is even possible; i mean, i plan the route assuming we'll be going really, really slow. maybe i just forget? anyways, this year was shaping up to be pretty much exactly the same. we would trail markers with distances on them, and the kids would exclaim, "we've gone 2 kilometers already!" and i would inwardly echo them, but with less "excitement" and more "chagrin". it was shaping up to be another long hike into the night. The kids didn't know it, but i was actually hoping to be in another hut for the second night. i know, i know, totally sissy, blah blah. in my defense, when i was making these plans, the weather was supposed to be really rainy, so it seemed like a good idea.

anyways, back to the "present", the kids leading, also the only kids with a watch, kept stopping for breaks, but not stopping for lunch, which i thought was strange. we were eating snacks like crazy (another thing i have a problem with is passing out snacks--it's just sort of a hassle usually. i bought a new pack this summer, and it has an "easy access" zipper on the side, and, as nelle pointed out, the more snacks i pass out the less i carry. so, we finally stopped for lunch at about 3pm, right next to a road; pretty much the least picturesque spot on our hike so far. as the kids munched on costco bagels and nutella, my co-leader beatrice and i wandered off for a conversation.

the problem is, in the woods, it gets dim at 4, and totally dark by 5. it was now 3, and we still had to do our activity for the day--a blindfold walk/follow hike-thing. because of slow guy #1 and #2, we were 50% of the way to the second hut, which meant at least 5 more hours of hiking. if we didn't want to hike to the hut, though, and chose to stay outside, the best spot for staying outside, according to the map, was ironically about 5 minutes away. conundrum: do we do the activity well and call it a day, or do we rush the activity and hike long and hard? the weather was pretty good, not too wet or anything... my gut desire was to hike all the way to the hut. after all, we really hadn't gone that far, or hiked that hard, but in the back of my mind, i remembered the surveys last years' group filled out. when asked if they would ever do something like this ever again, all but one of my kids circled "under no circumstances". and even though i knew the kids could make it to the hut, eventually, i just didn't want them to hate wilderness camp. besides, i realized, if we stopped now, we would get to the hut about lunch the next day, and we had a solo planned, and the hut would be a great spot to base the solo out of.

so that's what we did. bea (co-leader) and i ran ahead, and found a clearing just like the map said. interestingly, it was a chestnut grove, full of those little spiky things. the thought of being beaned in the head with one was on everyone's mind.

The activity went really well, and we still had time afterwards to hang out in the grove and learn how to put up flysheets and everything. Bea and i had some fun with a can of bug spray and a lighter--she discovered that literally exactly where she'd been planning on putting her head to sleep was a slightly buried bees' nest. BEES! it wasn't too big, but there were probably 50+ insects in there. so we did what any responsible hikers would have done: we toasted them! in my defense, some of the gals in the team were paralyzingly afraid of bees, and i didn't like the idea of pissing off the bugs and having them, you know, swarm and kill and eat us. because this is what happens in the woods.

I did laugh harder that night than i have ever laughed on wilderness camp in my life, but unfortunately it's a story that doesn't transfer very well to text. briefly, though, the important parts of the story are that most of the guys on the team were very easily scared of the dark, and i was very good at sneaking off the second they stopped watching me. my moment of glory was when i "disappeared" by hiding behind a tree, and the guys looked back and screamed, "OH MY GOSH!!!! MR. POTTER'S GONE!!!!!" and the whole group of guys, having just finished a pee-trip a ways down the trail, sprinted for camp in such a panic that they actually ran across the trail and down into the woods on the other side. THEN not only was i "coming to get them" (by laughing silently behind a tree), but they were "lost" to boot.

It was interesting to me that they really were terrified to be out in the woods alone. they were absolutely floored when i told them that i could, and would love to, spend the night in the woods alone, or hike for a few days on my own. they sort of have this "us or them" mentality about nature, rather than seeing themselves as a part of nature. probably has something to do with technology. stupid computers.

we got a raging fire going that night, using only soggy wood and the power of teamwork (and the skills of an amazing fire builder). our mac and cheese actually boiled over! and it was so, so delicious. as we were bedding down, some of the gals sharing a flysheet began laughing hysterically about absolutely nothing, and showed no signs of stopping. they were keeping everyone awake, and i thought, "if they have this kind of energy, we really didn't hike hard enough today." other than that, though, i really don't regret the choice to stay. like i said, it means they had a much more positive time!

Stress Camp '08
Day 1
(At last...)

One of the things we started doing a year or two ago is releasing the group information to the kids about a week in advance, so the kids know who they're going with, and there's time to have a meeting or 2 before we're actually out in the woods. It works really well--I get a chance to tell the kids what's important and what's not, how to build a fire in the rain, how to poop in the woods, do the maps/compass thing, etc. One of the things Nelle and I talk about, that we learned from someone who went through the same Masters program Nelle's in now (in Leadership, if you were curious), is that you have to be careful where you place the stressors when you're doing leadership training, or any sort of "learning game". If it's an easy initiative, make the groups stressful; put them with people they don't know or wouldn't usually hang out with. If it's a pretty stressful environment, you have to ease up in other ways. Which is why we don't wait until the day of to announce the groups anymore. And now we can pack ahead of time, so we actually leave CAJ at a decent time of the morning!

Because we were going somewhere that nobody had gone before, I actually had to go out and buy my own set of maps, which was fun--the kids are used to there being some safety net, some adult that will swoop in and save the day if they mess up, but I only had one set, and they got it! So, I said, I would have no idea where we were going. Of course, that's not strictly true--I had another map, just way more general and zoomed out. In addition to the maps, the kids that were leading got "the only" watch, so they had to get people up, choose where/when to eat and camp. More actual leadership!

As I said, I went somewhere nobody's gone before, as far as I know. I just didn't want to deal with bumping into other groups, competing for camping spots by cutting time off the group initiatives, etc. One of the other leaders were getting really possessive of their route, at one point actually telling Nelle that she wasn't allowed to hike on the route that she had marked on the maps, as he had apparently claimed it. I wasn't there when this happened, which is good, as i probably would have told him his butt smells like cheese, as a rebuttal to his elementary-school, "No fair, I saw it first" statement.

So I decided that rather than go out on the Seibu-Chichibu train line, and hike south to the Ome line, which is where the Okutama Bible Chalet (hitherforth referred to as OBC) and the end of our hiking is, we would actually take the Ome line out all the way to the end of the line, and hike a big arching route back. We were most of the way out there on the train--almost two hours of train travel--when I ran into my first major issue: we forgot the medkit.

Well, let's be honest here: it was totally my fault. When the team first assembled (that's just fun to say), i set it aside until we knew which set of students would be the first leaders--it's the responsibility of whichever team of kids is leading to carry and dispense the medicine (within reason, of course). this is one of the ways not only to give the kids more responsibility, but also means one less thing for me to cram into my pack. double bonus.

So, I admit, as I sat in the train, just a few stops from our destination, the idea did cross my mind (breifly, Brent) that we could do the trip without it. What a horrible idea! Ha! but still, I admit, i thought we would just be wasting our time waiting around for hours and hours for something that, in 4 trips, I had never needed, or really even opened, once. Instead, I did the "responsible" thing, and called some of the emergency numbers, to ask if we could get one delivered to us at all. no answer. i called some more of the emergency contact numbers. still nothing. silly people, i thought, they underestimate my ability to have an emergency before really even starting the trip!

I only ever ended up getting through to a teacher at CAJ, who really couldn't do anything for me. I sent the team ahead by bus, planning to catch up by taxi if i could, and wandered through the sleepy town at 10 in the morning, looking for a drug store. I ended up finding one, and even managed to get a pretty good little kit together, using my limited medical knowledge and some good old trusty hand-motions: medicine for pains, stomach stuff, poopy-stuff, etc. I then took the next bus up to the trailhead where the kids were waiting for me. all told, we lost about an hour. not really that bad.

The team was waiting for me at a pretty cool floating bridge. We filled up with water there, and hit the road. The route I had picked had us getting most of our elevation that first day, to make our way to a major ridge. There was (on the maps, at least) a shelter of some sort up on the ridge, and the plan was to hike well into the dark, but make the hut, so we wouldn't have to worry about setting up camp. it worked really well, actually. we were letting the kids lead, and we were going really, really slowly--interestingly, the 2 slowest people were guys. one of the slow guys had mentioned casually as we filled up water at the dam that he hadn't drank water since he could remember. thinking he was kidding, i played along, only to find out that he has drank only carbonated beverages since he can remember. mind-blowing.

Anyways, it would be drudgery to write about the actual hiking, other than that it was pretty steep and the weather was pretty much perfect. eventually, we made it to the hut, and the first thing we saw when we went in was a medkit with a note and a snack. evidently, someone had gotten the message, and, since we had all logged our route beforehand, the staff at the camp had hiked out and left us a present! even though we didn't have to set up camp, we still had to get a fire going and cook, and we didn't settle in until about midnight, so I decided to let them sleep in a little the next day. After all, this was more exercise in a day than some of them got in a month!

Pre-script:
This started out as the same entry as the re-telling of the events from Stress Camp 2008, but grew into something different, so i'll post it first, mostly just to get it out of the way. It's sort of long, and maybe a little boring, but explains the rationale and change that has happened within stress camp. It's at least worth a skim!

The mentality of stress camp in the past seems to have had more to do with teaching survival skills, showing students that they are capable of more than they think, and being a lesson for overcoming obstacles. Also it was good for them to have an actual adventure, where unexpected things happen and there are no easy outs when they get too tired to go on. And, to be honest, i agree with a lot of those reasons. it really makes me mad when kids give up on hard stuff. it boggles my mind that these kids have never, as far as they can remember, gone one single day without some kind of gadget. and they've re-defined "adventure" to be something you do on the internet! and so, for the last 1,000 years, stress camp has been going on as a time for kids to get out of their comfy little lives, and go experience a real adventure, do something really hard, and accomplish something they could be proud of. And i do think that these are good, true things.

The problem is, that's not really defensible. CAJ can't really sell that one to the parents. Kids have been trying to get out of it for years, and more and more, parents have started trying to get their kids out of it. And I can't really imagine the reasons that CAJ gives: "One day, we'll all be chased into the woods by the invading armies, and if your kids don't know how to build a fire, they'll never survive the first week!". Well, to be fair, it was probably something more down the lines of character building. So, in the past, the idea was to have kids have a "good experience" (in the sense that it was good for them, not that they enjoyed it), that they would remember for the rest of their lives, and be proud of. And what if the kids aren't proud of it? What if they're overweight and have a horrible time? The overwhelming response from students, when asked "would you ever do something like this again?", was "I would rather suffer death by fire-ants". Seriously. The single greatest effect Stress Camp had was to convince kids that adventuring outside is horrible, and we have earned the right to stay inside with our machines, so that's where we'll be. Maybe 1 kid in each class would go again, and they probably had that mentality before they went out into the woods anyways. Most of the kids (and they've started handing out a survey after stress camp every year, so this is actually based on fact) would never, ever do anything like stress camp ever again if they had the chance to.

So, something had to change. It all came to a head a few years ago, in the now-infamous "typhoon year" of stress camp (my first year as a leader, incidentally). parents were furious that the administration was forcing their child to sleep outside in the woods during a typhoon. and the administration realized that stress camp could no longer continue as it had been for eons, but would either have to be stopped entirely, as the values of stress camp no longer matched up with the schools goals for the students, or the school would have to figure out just what it's goals for the students were, and re-work stress camp to fit with those goals. which is what they did.

In some ways, nothing has really changed--we still go out and hike in the woods and sleep outside and build fires to cook over and things (the western, "leave-no-trace" fad has yet to catch on...), but now the leaders carry curriculum with them, too. The idea is that they learn some stuff from the experience, stuff that translates to other contexts besides being in the woods (although knowing how to poop in the woods is a valuable life skill, I've found). Each day there is a theme, and there are verses and quotes that go along with these themes, as well as questions and opportunity for discussion. The themes all have to do with leadership, and help the kids (in theory) to become better leaders. Additionally, for each theme there is an activity of some sort (blindfold walk, solo, etc.) that helps the kids to experience or think more deeply about the theme.

I was suspicious, I admit. I was skeptical. These are good things, in theory, but to do them well requires a fair amount of time, which means that much less time hiking, and actually going somewhere. Last year, i didn't really build in the time to use the curriculum, cuz I'd never used it before and had no idea how long it would take or what it would mean to use it. So, the activities were all rushed, the discussions ended up being more like lectures by me, and the whole thing really felt like it was forced, added on. Which, to be fair, it was. This year, though, things were different. Which was hard for me to do, cuz (ironically) it meant that things weren't as hard for the kids!

For starters, we hiked around in a circle....

And we're off to Wilderness Camp! (aka Stress Camp) Nelle and I are both leaders of our own groups, which is scary and exciting. it's also pouring rain, and it's supposed to keep doing so for at least 3 of the 4 days we're out there. so....that's...something. actually, i'm going on a new route that nobody's done before, and i think there's huts for me to sleep in at night, if we really need to. nelle, though, is going on a more central route, so she has to duke it out with 2 other leaders to see who gets the dry sleeping places. one of the other leaders has been sick for a while, and just last night they finally made the call that she wouldn't be going, so they're having to split up the 5th group among the other 4, so each leader is getting 10 kids, or thereabouts. my co-leader this year is a young-ish australian gal, and i'm pretty excited to have her going with. i have a 0-for-4 record of my co-leaders ever coming back to lead again, so i'm hoping she'll break that trend.

more from the other side!

So, this is my big comeback. It's been a good year, with lots of stuff happening. I went through some of my pics from the year and picked out some of my favorites. They are in a sort of apathetical chronological order--the ones that are really obvious are sort of in the right place, and the ones that nobody really can tell the time of year are wherever they decided to be. I've spent the last hour editing the HTML trying to get this to where it is, and i'm not changing it. Anyone who's tried to arrange pictures in here knows what I'm saying. Check back at some point, and hopefully I'll have the pics set up so you can have a little context when your mouse hovers over them.

But for now, I need to get to bed--tomorrow's my first day teaching real classes to real students. Except that i'm not actually teaching Bible tomorrow--that actually starts tuesday. But, on the books, I start my career as a full-time Bible and Woodworking teacher tomorrow, which doesn't explain why I've been doing this, something that has no relevance. Or, maybe it does, considering that I've spent pretty much every waking minute for the last week preparing, sorting, moving, cleaning, shopping, blah, blah, blah........(snore)

***EDIT***
I updated again, so now if you let your mouse hover over the picture, you'll get a little description of what's going on.

3 things that are official:

1. We have a car! It's an awesome little k-van, with sunroofs and windows and...space for a dog! it's a stick. We're totally going hiking/camping with it as soon as possible. The gearing is a little weird though...1st gear is pretty much meant only for going up cliffs or something, cuz 90% of the time, I just start with 2nd. Still, though. Notice the room in the thing. And the windows. And the roofs. Awesome.









2. I'm a Bible teacher! CAJ offered me a contract (which i signed!) to teach Bible to it's students (anthropomorphic?). So I'll be the Woodworking slash Bible teacher! This means that I'm leaving the church as a pastor, though, so that's sad.


3. Spring! We survived the long, cold, lame winter, and now the highs for every day are just getting higher and higher! Seriously, wintertime just makes me feel brittle. Summertime makes me feel like playing in the water. Warmer weather just makes everyone happier. I love it.

And on to the honeymoon! We 'mooned on the Isle of Bali, part of the great country of Indonesia. We were there for 10 days, and during those 10 days, we probably walked about 100 miles. We get to Bali, it's late, and all we have is a “Lonely Planet Guide to Bali” book that was written about 10 years ago. Turns out the date of publication on stuff like that is actually rather important. So, we take a taxi to an area that we'd found while thumbing through “the book”, and, eventually, find a place to stay. “The book” ended up listing prices for things (including places to stay) at roughly half of what they were in reality. That took some getting used to, and it took a few more trips to the bank that we had anticipated. We stayed the Lombok area for 2 days, which were spent mostly walking up and down the coastline. Weather-wise, it was actually a lot chillier than we had expected. We were both (unconsciously) expecting the weather to be a lot like Thailand was a few years ago—so hot that the ocean water doesn't actually feel cold enough—but Bali was overcast and slightly rainy pretty much the whole time we were there.

After 2 days there we decide to take a boat to another island, one (we hoped) would be less....how do I say....tourisy, crawling with street vendors and hawkers, and developed. I almost lost our breakfast on the boat ride to Nusa Lembongan,, which is something like 20 miles off the coast of Bali. Once the rain stopped, I got on the roof of the battered wooden boat we were riding, and felt better. I also saw a shark! Just a little one, though.

Lembongan was a lot better than where we'd been staying. It was much less crowded, more conducive to adventuring. We got totally lost on the way from the bay where the boat landed to the area with places to stay (Mushroom Bay area, in case you're curious). We were being followed by a vendor with an umbrella (we think he was hoping it would rain so he could rent it to us?), so we just kept walking, and ended up on dirt roads and paths between cow fields and stuff. We ended up at the back entrance to a deserted temple above the town. But, we got to where we wanted to go, and got a cottage with aircon. All but one of the places we stayed had outdoor bathrooms, which were so cool I want one. All the plumbing—the bathroom sink, the shower/bath, the toilet, etc., is all “outside”. There's a roof over the toilet, but the shower and sink just have high walls, and no roof. This place had that.
Lembognan is much smaller than Bali, but it's still big enough, and undeveloped enough, that we thought we should see if we could rent a scooter to get around and see stuff, so we went to a vendor who was yelling at us about renting a scooter when we'd been on our way to breakfast. We asked to see the scooters he was renting, and he just pointed over to one parked by his shop. He wasn't renting scooters, he was going to rent us his scooter for the day. Which we gladly took. No pesky paperwork, no messing with licenses or paperwork or passports or even helmets. We gave him the money, he gave us the key. Yay! So we scooted around for the day, and had a lot of fun. We would see cool looking places off in the distance, and try and get there. We ended the evening as the only patrons at a cafe set on a cliff above the sea, the sun setting over Bali over by the horizon.

We learned the hard way that, in Bali, not only do they not make food until you order it, they usually don't buy the food to make until you order it. So it was in this case; the cook/owner sent his wife off down the path on a scooter to buy the ingredients for our supper. This means fresh food, yes, but we had the bad habit of waiting until we were hungry to find a restaurant, which means by the time our food came, an hour later, we were so hungry we couldn't even carry on conversation anymore, we'd just stare off at stuff. We also typically only ate 2 meals a day, which probably didn't help.

2 days there on Lembognan, then back to the main island, mostly because there was no ATM anywhere near, and we were running out of cash. That whole Lonely Planet thing again. We ended up staying in a very nice area, with lots to see within walking distance, but we managed to find a “guest home”, rather than a cottage. A guest home is more like a youth hostel. Like a complex with small apartments. A cottage is your own little house. We didn't really mind, though, cuz there's no way there was anything better in the area that didn't cost an arm and a leg. Really nice resorts just across the street. We'd cross the street, and walk through, and end up on the boardwalk and beach on the other side. It was while we were at this place that we bought a comb and scissors and I cut Nelle's dreds sitting out on a pier. People stared. In spite of the fact that our room had a leak, and there were never new towels or sheets or anything, and there was only one, blazingly bright florescent light in the place, we stayed there for 3 days, one day longer than we'd stayed at any of our past places. It really was a nice area, and the room was pretty cheap, so we figured we'd do the last 3 days at a nicer, more expensive place, and justify it by staying in a cheaper place first. Good idea.

The last place we ended up was right near Nusa Dua, which is the most poshest area of Bali, with the biggest, most over-the-top, expensive resorts on the island. They're all in a row, and the resort we stayed in the last 3 days was the first one after the row of Club-Med-style resorts. And it was totally great! The room was huge, there were fresh bottles of water in the fridge, the aircon was great, the people came in while we were gone and replaced stuff, and (gasp) there was cable TV! We watched a lot of TV for the first while we were there. We were so tired of walking for miles and miles, and bartering and deciding where to go and eat and everything. The place had a few lounge chairs out on their little stretch of beach, breakfast was included in the price of the room (it's nice to get up and not have to figure out where to walk to for food. And it was buffet-style!), and there was a nice grocery store a little bit down the road. We ended up buying bread and jam and oreo's and some other essential food items, and we'd eat breakfast, eat a late lunch/early dinner, and eat snacks in front of the TV. Actually, there wasn't that much on TV worth watching (as usual).

Our flight out left in the evening, and we had to be out of our room by noon, so we ended up watching Die Hard 4 and Transformers at a mall to pass the time. Both were quality entertainment, for the record, although I'd be more likely to rent and re-watch Die Hard. Personal preference. The flights to and from Tokyo and Bali are both listed as “direct flights”, but on the way back they always (apparently) “stop off” in Jakarta, which is definitely not in a direct line between Tokyo and Bali. I suspect it has to do with Bail being a fairly small island and not wanting to top off every 747 that flies out. So we had to sit around in the middle of the night in Jakarta for 2 hours. Boring.