Well, the camp has gotten off to a kick ass start. It was an experience before it even began, with four other American PCV climber guys crashing at my place: Sean, Jon, Mike and Mike. First, five guys in one apartment would be messy enough but my apartment had gone on the offensive against us, making it worse. There was no water for the first day, and not enough water pressure for hot water on the second and third, meaning no one was taking showers and the dishes were piling up. Also, the water shuts off at 11:00 PM every night anyway, meaning no toilet flushing. Add the hot weather and us sleeping two to the bed, two to the couch and one (this position is rotated) on the floor and all sweating like crazy and and all these smells combined into one huge funk.
On top of that we lost power for a while yesterday, two breakers blew again today and my laptop crashed (I'm taking it to someone who has recovery software in twenty minutes) so the first night's entertainment: watching DVDs, was out thereafter.
But it's still been a fantastic time. No one has noticed the problems and we all roll with them 'cause it's Ukraine and we're PCVs and generally someone always has it worse. Instead we've been whipping up big batches of pasta in the evening, eating communally out of the pot and going head to head in rotating chess matches that go extremely late, with the converstation richocheting from politics to sex to sports.
I have MISSED male companions. I never see Steve and Jon anymore, and while I have a number of female friends that I enjoy spending time with, it's almost impossible to hit the same level of comraderie, bare knuckle debate and, of course, raunchiness, with female friends. So I've really enjoyed the past few days.
Not to mention they've been spent climbing.
We had 18 kids show up on the first day of the camp, less than I wanted but more than I expected. I was shooting for 24 and thought they would come from the 50+ kids we'd had at the climbing wall who said they wanted to do the camp, but a lot couldn't participate because travel, studies, work (it's harvest season), etc. From that 50, we had 2. And the roster had been the last thing on my mind because I assumed it would be popular: of course, it might be, but no one knew about it. There was a blitz to get the word out, but by the time the articles hit newspapers and radios and everyone had called who they could call, we still had only 15 kids commited. So it was cool when 18 showed up.
Amongst the instructors the camp was a little shaky the first day because most Instructors were coming in last minute and we were short on prep. All the climbing time was spent on basic skills, too, and many didn't even get on a route because it took so long to teach them the knots and belaying (that was my fault; I've taught it a dozen times in Russian and can explain it pretty easily, but I left it in the hands of Mike, who has more experience teaching climbing than me, but not through a language barrier; I wasn't teaching climbing because I was floating among the three concurrent sessions and being gopher). And while the first day went okay, I felt the energy amongst the kids wasn't huge. They were participating, but they didn't seem really, really into it.
I wasn't surprised when only 12 showed up this morning, but those 12 had come to climb and have fun and today was a blast. They each finished two routes (and only one had climbed on real rock before), we played a ton of games, they listened to two healthy lifestyles lectures from ACET and we had a competition with posters from Black Diamond as prizes. The energy fed back and forth between the kids and the instructors and though we all dragged ourself to the camp in the morning by the afternoon we were all having a blast.
And it's only day 2.
So, there's some things I'd do differently if I did it again (but I'm a perfectionist) and I learned a lot from the whole process of planning and executing, but I can't say it's anything but successful so far and it looks to get better: a film crew from a local TV station is filming tomorrow, some of the cooler "ropes course" challenges will be done tomorrow and, hopefully, the tee-shirts will arrive. We ended up with so much swag that we abandoned the idea of a point system and the kids get swag for every milestone: New England Ropes posters when they could properly show how to belay, stickers for correctly tying knots, and tomorrow we'll do a healthy lifestyles quiz for them to earn their tee-shirts, and then they can wear their tee-shirts for the rest of camp.
Due to lower attendance and swag still coming (stuff from Mammut, Metolius and Rock and Ice are, theoretically, still in the mail), we'll have extra tee-shirts and stuff for next year when, hopefully the girls will do it again.
I'm pumped from today, so life is good.
Pictures up when I get some time!