This weekend I was invited to go on the 8th grade trip to Tauna river. 16 kids and three teachers(including myself) loaded the bus at 8:30 on Friday(18th) morning. We weren't totally sure what all we were going to be doing but we knew it would include a lot of things outside and white water rafting! It was so fun to spend some time with the kids outside of school. The 8th grade class is known for being the "good" class so they really were so much fun to spend the weekend with. It was about a two hour drive. Once we got up to the Savage Wilderness camp they divided the kids into groups by writing on their foreheads with permanent markers, only at camp can you do something like this without the kids freaking out!
Once they were divided into their teams, which they self titled “The Flame” and “Yo Mama”. You can tell which team had a lot of personality on it! They played lots of team building games. Charades, team paper-rock-scissors, trust fall, and other things like that, which I have no idea what to call them.
After lots of fun games all afternoon it was time to eat. The food was really good all weekend except for one thing…lots of onions! Aje, you would not have liked it AT ALL!
Our first night at the camp we did “Night Line”. Basically what they had done was connect a bunch of long ropes along the outside of the camp. The ropes followed ABSOLUTELY no path and you just had to hold onto the rope and walk around in the pitch dark. The path took us under bushes and sometimes through them, into pricker patches, through the stream, and up little water falls. It was really fun, except some kids got really freaked out because they were afraid hyenas were going to eat them (only in Africa).
The next morning we all woke up with the sun, as it shone right in our eyes. We ate breakfast and headed out for a little hike in the surrounding hills. It was such a beautiful day.
As we walked we were able to get close to the river that we would raft down the next day. As we stood and looked at the water fall all I could think was “NO WAY!” But they told us that there were easier parts then over the water fall and that at the hard parts the kid would get out and walk round, notice I say the kids!
We got back and camp and the kids split into their teams again. One group went repelling off of the bungee jumping tour at the camp and the other group learned to kayak in the pool. There were lots of tears at the repelling tour as the kids were super scared. They all made it though, we were quite proud of them. As usual I maintained my position as the photographer and kept both feet firmly planted on the ground! J
After an afternoon of fun adventures I went back to the cabin and took a little nap. The kids played some more games and had no problem having lots of energy! That night after dinner the kids made bottle rockets and shot them off. One of them flew so high that we totally lost it.
We tried to get to bed early on Saturday night as we knew we would need a lot of energy for the rafting on Sunday. We finally all were able to fall asleep at about 11:30. I was sleeping soundly after the long day when at about 3:15 I heard a horrible scream and then a thud. One of the girls had, had a bad dream and ended up falling off the top bunk. If you know me it takes me awhile to wake up, so I was quite out of it. I tried to get up as fast as I could and find a flash light. I got the light and headed toward the girl on the floor. When I shone the light on the floor all I saw was a pool of blood under her head. Of course, I freaked out, I don’t know what to do with things like that. I told the girls to keep talking to her and ran out to go and get the other teachers and the head of the camp. Well, to make a long story short thankfully it was not her head, but she had taken a big chunk out of her lip. It took us all awhile to get it all cleaned up and head back to bed. Needless to say, we didn’t not get the good nights sleep that we were hoping for. The girl had to have a few stitches, but seems to be doing ok now.
Sunday morning was the big raft trip. The kids were really nervous, ok so maybe I was too. But we had a beautiful day and everything went very smoothly. Thankfully there were no run ins with Hippos or any other animals for that matter. No boats flipped but there were a lot of kids in the water as the guides kept joking around with them and dumping them in. We got good at pulling each other back into the boat. It was a very memorable experience and all the kids really loved it. I don’t have any pictures yet from the actual rafting trip (it is hard to keep cameras dry while you are rafting) but another woman took some so hopefully I will get them from her soon. Thank you for all of you who prayed for our trip. It really was so much fun and I hope I get to do it again next year. Maybe next year I will try repelling, yea probably not!!!
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