I flew in on Wednesday evening, landing in Oaxaca fairly late. I was picked up at the airport by Abi and we went straight to the ranch, and upon arriving at the ranch I went straight to bed. I don't remember what time I got up the next morning, but it was relatively early. I think it might have been the first time that I was the only American on site. I wandered around for a bit and yelled at the dogs for barking at me. We had breakfast and just kind of waited around for Dave to arrive. At some point, he showed up with his rental from the airport, and we went to pick up Abi and drive up to Eloxochitlan. The drive up is about 6 hours, and after the first hour or so it's mostly windy roads. I was not really doing well on this drive. We had to pull over twice to let me take a break. On the second stop, I came about as close to losing my lunch as possible. I got all the way to the gag reflex, but nothing came up. Interestingly, after that happened, I felt better in the way you feel better after you throw up. I don't know if there's some sort of psychological or physiological thing happening there, but that gag reflex step seemed to be the reset that the body was looking for. Because I was completely fine after that point.
We were heading up to Eloxochitlan to look at the room for the science center and talk to the guy that was going to pour the concrete tables. This is a slightly scary step for us because once they're poured, we're pretty much just going to have to work with whatever we've got. I had drawings and measurements, but it's not until you're in the space that you can really get a good sense of whether it's going to work. So we spent a while drawing the layout on the floor and trying to "physically" feel everything out. The floorplan we ended up with was very close to what was on the paper. We put a little extra room between the tables and and a little extra space for the students with their back to the wall, but other than that everything seemed to work out just fine.
Because we made it back down, the next day started off pretty casual. There wasn't work for us to do because we weren't supposed to be back yet. At some point, we went out and bought pieces to build a rotating compost bin. The only thing of note that night was that I had my first Mexican pizza, which was also a Little Caesar's Hot-And-Ready pizza and nothing at all like the Taco Bell Mexican pizza. But here's the interesting thing:
The next day we built the built the composting bin. It was not a difficult build, but it did just take some time. Our first attempt to cut the wood was with the world's dullest hand saw. We eventually upgraded to a sawzall. The amusing thing is that we would not be able to dispose of the hand saw. The reason is that Octavio, who is the farm helper that takes the trash to be burned, would just put it back again. Dave said that he's tried to dispose of power tool batteries that won't hold their charge, but they would just keep magically reappearing back in the closet. So there's going to be a dull hand saw hanging in the equipment room for the foreseeable future. That's just how life is, I guess. We got mostly through the build. We were short a couple nuts and bolts, so we weren't able to put the door back on it.
That day was also our big shopping day. Four full carts at Sam's club (I think we spent $1,000 there) and then a batch of vegetables from the Abastos market later. On the way back, we picked up Reno folks from the airport.
The next morning (Sunday), we went into full camp prep mode. There were beds to be made, science to be set up, crafts to be shopped for... And so we did that. And that's also when the students started arriving. At this point, it's important to make two observations. The first is that we were not expecting them to arrive until the next day, and the second is that they kept coming. By the end of the night, we were looking at about 60-70 students with more expected on the next day (the actual arrival day). When all was said and done, I think we had 95 students on site, which was the largest number by quite a bit. I think the previous record was somewhere in the 70s.
I'm not going to do a day-by-day for this next part because it was all very hectic. There was some confusion about the dish-washing process, which created some hang-ups on the first couple nights. We were scrambling around for cups, plates, and utensils at various times throughout the week. And all that food we bought, which is usually expected to last at least a week and a half was completely gone by the end of the week. But for the camp itself, it seems that things went pretty well. Here are a few quick notes:
- The week's theme was "Que vas hacer con tu vida" (What are you going to do with your life?). As always, it's very outreach focused, which is something that I kind of wish the American church would be better at (but that's another conversation for another day). One of the challenges was for the kids to think about what they want their life to be when they turn 35, and then try to work backwards from there to think about what they would need to have happen by the time they're 25, or 20, or whatever. For some of the kids, they never really think that much about the future, so it was challenging and stimulating for them. And for others, they were already 20 or 25 years old, and so the challenge was a bit of a reality check for them. (Yes, we had young adults of those ages at the camp. Because many of them don't finish school, they don't have the 18 year old "adulthood" marker and instead the next major marker in their lives is marriage. So if you're 16 and married, you can't come to camp, but if you're 25 and single, you can.
- It's probably universal that teenagers have attitudes. At some point, there was a student that didn't want to participate. When Pastor Chable confronted her about it, she said that there was a personality conflict on the team. Pastor Chable then explained to the student that they've only had a few activities together as a group, and that's not enough time to really develop a personality conflict, and so they needed to get back to participating. Then he dropped this on them: "We're running a camp, not a hotel. If you don't want to participate, good luck getting home." Insert mic-drop-gif. There are times I think something like that needs to be dropped on American kids. (Because kids these days...)
- We celebrated Estella's 50th birthday at camp. The first thing that happened was a 5 AM serenade by a couple of the students. And then for lunch that afternoon, we had a professional mariachi band come in and play, and they bought enough roses so that everyone in the camp was able to give her one, leading to a 20-minute long procession of flowers and hugs (with the band playing in the background). That brought back all sorts of memories about the celebration a number of years ago (perhaps 5 years ago) when we had an entire mariachi band at 5 AM and an unfortunate American sleeping in the common room in his underwear when it all went down. (Good memories because I wasn't the one in their underwear!)
- This year's games were of a much higher quality than in previous years. I guess the family had been watching a lot of TV and there's a Mexican version of something like "Minute to Win It" and so they had a lot of interesting team challenges for the students to try out. One game involved a hair scrunchy with four ropes tied to it, and they had to pull it apart to open it up and use the elasticity to grab onto a ball and then transport it. It's really a good communication/coordination type game. I think the kids really got into them.
- The science stuff went well. We only had two science days, which actually worked out better than what we were doing before. Before, we would have a time block and split it 50-50 with crafts, which made for a hectic craft experience and we also lost time to the transition. This year, we did a 50-50 split of days instead of a 50-50 split of that time block, which gave us a bit more time and more flexibility. Pancho took the first day to teach them about pressure, using the classic bed-of-nails concept to show that a balloon simply wouldn't pop if pressed down on enough nails. He also did a short thing on boomerangs (a project that ultimately worked the way we wanted it to, which was great!). We talked a bit about composting, and also did corn starch fireballs, which Chris had the idea to connect together by talking about the importance of oxygen in both situations.
Then I was at the airport on Sunday morning, and took the flight I've taken several times before back into Mexico City, and then back to Vegas. My first meal back was ramen. I also fell asleep at 9:30 local time and woke up at 5:00 local time. It may take me a couple days to get back to a normal schedule, but it's 8:30 PM right now, and I'm not sure that I'll make it to 10:00.
Thor did okay while I was gone. I had a friend checking in every couple days. Apparently, he did a couple small non-food vomits, which may be an indicator of stress or may be something else (becaues I had not noticed any such vomits before. They suggested that Thor might have gotten a bit stressed in my absence, which would be interesting if true. In my first full day back, he seems to be behaving normally. We'll see what happens when I disappear again at the end of the week for another 10 days or so with a different friend checking in on him.
I don't have too much more to say because that's kind of all I've been up to. I got bit by a lot of bugs as usual. I'm a little bit congested with a bit of a cough right now, but not too abd. I went in to work for a bit today to just get caught up on emails, but today was really mostly about getting unpacked and cleaned up. I'll have a couple days of "normal" work before heading out to California again for the InterVarsity faculty retreat. I need to get up and physically move around right now otherwise I might just fall asleep, and that's not helpful.
