I'm back!

Alriiiiighty made it back to Angol the night before last, after about 3 weeks of shenanigans.  I'll start from the beginning: English Winter Camp!

My program, English Opens Doors, has a lot of initiatives outside of just us volunteers, and one of the biggest is English Camps.  During winter and summer vacation they put on week-long camps around the country, and as volunteers we are required to work in whichever camp they assign us.  A lot of volunteers say that camp is their favorite week of the whole program, because the students who apply for camp are the students who are most excited and advanced English-speakers, and you just get to do fun activities with them for 5 days.  We work with Chilean university students who are studying to become English teachers, and some already-teaching Chilean English teachers who oversee everything for us counselors.  I was assigned to overnight camp in Panguipulli ("pangy-puyi"), a town in the region south of ours. I had never seen it, but everybody kept telling me how gorgeous it was so I was excited to go! 

We got there Sunday afternoon and had our first team meeting to plan out the opening ceremony the next day. The national camp theme this year was music--to be more specific, "Rhythm's gonna get you!"--so there was going to be a lot of singing and dancing and music-making all week.  To be honest, I was pretty shocked by the lack of planning and organization, which did not bode well for the week ahead. That night I dreamed that I was in a play but nobody would give me the script, and they just glared at me onstage whenever I had lines.  So... yeah... that's what it felt like. Unfortunately, that ended up being a pretty good vision of the week, camp-activity-wise. Every day we got up around 8:30 (we stayed upstairs in the school dorms, while the kids were downstairs), got breakfast in the cafeteria, and started our activities at 10.  There were 9 of us leaders and 60 students, so we split up into 3 groups with 3 counselors and 20 students each.  We did most of the activities with these groups, stumbling through the national outline that English Opens Doors had made for all camps.  It was a little difficult because we didn't have functioning laptops or wifi for the first few days, which made the music-y projects all but impossible.  An hour and a half for lunch at 1, more activities, an hour and a half for dinner at 6, and then more activities from 7:30-9:30.  Then all of us leaders usually got together for planning meetings and to hang out each night.  A goooood portion of my energy that week was spent trying not to let my incredible frustration show through to the students or our bosses.  

But it wasn't all bad!  Our group of leaders all got along really well and had a good time together, and our school setting was amazing. For one thing, we were at a technical school where one of the career programs is gastronomy, and students there got to use camp to practice their cooking/serving, so we had fantastic meals all week. Secondly, we had a breathtaking view of Panguipulli and the lake and volcano behind it. It was one of the most beautiful parts of Chile I've seen!  We all kept taking the same pictures of the lake every day because it looked different every time, depending on the light and clouds and time of day. So I have photos for you! I took way more than necessary, so these are just the best ones:

this was the morning view out my dorm window!

Because we had such long days with the students, the leaders took shifts and everybody got at least one morning off. I was lucky enough to get beautiful weather on my free morning, so I went for a walk up to the top of the hill we were on.  I had to climb under a barbed wire fence to get to the spot I wanted, but I found it!  From up on this high point I could see the volcano across the lake (Choshuenco, I think) perfectly and also the Villarrica volcano perfectly on the other side.  While I was up there taking pictures, somebody walked up and I was afraid they were going to tell me to get off their private land, but instead we had a nice chat. He was the ranch hand who had been working on that hill for 20 years and pointed out all the points of interest on the horizon to me. Quite the morning! 

Choshuenco

Villarrica

+ cows

Wednesday was probably our busiest camp day. We had to make a lipdub video for the Kelly Clarkson song "Stronger," as did all the other camps, for a national competition (we did not win). It was a LOT of work, but the kids got into it and we were proud of it by the end! Here's the finished product. My group had the middle section, so we start around minute 1 and end at minute 2. For your viewing pleasure:

I actually hadn't watched that since the week of camp, it makes me miss my campers! They were such a sweet group of students.  But more on that in a second.  Wednesday afternoon we got to take some time off while the campers watched a movie, so the leaders all walked into town together and went to check out the lake! 

heading down the hill into town

volcano hiding under the clouds

here we are, minus one girl who was taking a nap. can you tell which are the gringos and which are the Chileans??

I just like this picture

Ok now for the best part: the campers. They were our saving grace that week.  I have never met so many well-behaved, respectful, loving high school students.  My group happened to be mostly boys (15/20), so it was a little tricky to get our team engaged in all the song and dance thing we had to do, but they were exceedingly polite and helpful. It was almost shocking to me! One of our first tasks was to create a group name and posters, so we set to work and they decided on "The Wolves" (I swear they came up with that and not me! They were a bunch of teenagers after my own heart). They made 3 different posters and we decided to keep them all. 

teenage boys for ya. but LOOK HOW BADASS THIS IS

We took tons of pictures all week, but here are the best group shots: first the whole camp, and then just The Wolves. 

the campers plus me and my Chilean co-pilots Bastian and Gary : ) 

For the last day we all had to prepare something for a camp talent show, and we decided to do Michael Jackson's Thriller dance. It took a loooong time and we didn't really have any dance-gifted people in our group so the choreo was a struggle for us, but we pulled it off and it was really fun! Here's a video of it that a camper uploaded to facebook (I think you should be able to see it!): https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=576295015745754&set=o.482730088485699&type=2&theater

I added a lot of my campers to the facebook I made for my Chilean students so I can stay in touch with them. All in all, it was a challenging but very rewarding week!  

p.s.  The leaders made a harlem shake video as a treat for the campers, and as soon as I can get my hands on it I will share it here too! It's kind of awesome...