Tuesday, August 7, 2018

If You Could Read My Mind...

The skies over Norway.
     ...you'd probably be surprised about what's going to come next. (How's that for clickbait?) But let me take a minute to take care of a few other things first. I'm planning with this post to do a bit of an after-action report of the camp and how it all went for me. I want to get my thoughts down on electrons before I forget too much about what went on. I've noticed with time that I tend to forget the bad things that happened and only remember the good. So this will have a bit of both. The good, the bad and the ugly (not that there was a lot of that). So here goes.
     In reverse order, the ugly stuff first. I'm not a fan of being American in a foreign country. More specifically, I'm not a fan of being associated (i.e. in a crowd) with loud Americans. We had a great team this year. Each member was essential to the success of the camp. However, sometimes I just like to be quiet, enjoy the scenery and not stand out in the crowd. That means I like to be in a group of locals who understand the local customs and aren't intent on standing out as foreigners.
     Sometimes that's inevitable. I'm not trying to speak bad of my fellow team members. I'm just talking about my personal preferences. It's something I have to learn to live with. You can choose whether or not to be bothered by what is happening around you. Either do an Elsa and let it go or can it up inside and let it ruin your week. Your choice. During overseas trips, I need to make the choice to push away the annoyance and enjoy the other great things that are happening around me. Food, architecture, historical sights, friends. That sort of thing.
     Next up is the bad. Surprisingly there really wasn't a lot of bad this year. I could list out the little things like A/C turned off in the hotel, mosquitoes, or the occasional headache. But I was really happy with how this year went.
     I still need to work on my lesson prep. I haven't really done a lot of it besides for camp. I think if I'm tailoring my lessons toward the intermediate group, I should have shorter reading with not a lot of vocabulary. It was frustrating to see how students started zoning out during lessons if there was too much reading.
     Now for the good. There's almost too much to list. I really enjoyed Ultimate Frisbee, the food, seeing old friends again, being in the country meeting new people, making new memories, sharing worship time with the Ukrainian staff and a hundred other things I can't remember at this moment. This camp was probably the best one I've been to in the years since I've started doing this.
     Last year after the camp, I wrote that I wanted to work on my language skills and fitness before camp this year. I did both a little bit. I've been mountain biking a lot this summer and it's helped to build up my endurance. It didn't do a great deal towards the running part of the quest. But I managed to do pretty well.
     I also watched a Russian TV show called Нюхач (Sniffer). It's a typical police procedural with a little bit of whimsy thrown in. It was filmed predominantly in Kiev (first point of interest). But it also helped me hear and draw out the Russian vocabulary I did remember (second point). The first two seasons are on Youtube if you're interested. It was good to hear the language again and remind me a bit of the flow, intonation and grammar of Russian.
Learning to play Spot It.
     Alright, confession time. Before this camp started, I had been planning on taking a year off of going to Ukraine for the summer camps. There are a lot of other things I want to spend my summer vacation on like traveling, camping, and biking trips. But after this camp, I'm not so sure now.
     See, I've been starting to feel a little fatigued by the year-after-year teaching/traveling/cross-cultural-exchange. I've been doing this every summer since 2014 with a triple shot during the summer of 2016. That's seven camps in just a few years. It's not that I don't want to do it any more. I'd just like to have some me time. Perhaps a year off and then back at it the next.
     But then this camp comes along, goes extremely well and leaves me wanting to do it again. Crazy, right? I know, I'm surprised too. At the end of camp last year, it felt like the right time to end the week. However after the closing ceremonies this year, I still wanted to do more. Definitely not right away even though my friends there would have been glad for the help. It was like I was ready to start planning immediately for next year to go back.
     So I'm left with a conundrum. Should I stay or should I go? At this moment I'm definitely leaning more towards go. Go again and see what opportunities God creates in 2019. Besides, there are still a bunch of people from my church who haven't gone or haven't gone in a while and they might need a friendly face to share the time. If you're one of those people, corner me one day before or after church and I'd be glad to tell you all about it. It's not exactly reading my mind but I'll let you see a bit of it.
Me in the middle doing my best impression of Brian May.

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