Our contact Maxim had been telling us about “Extreme fishing
camp” for some time now, and now that time had finally come. I think my team
was trying their best to be optimistic, and why shouldn’t we? Hadn’t our
previous experience at the village taught us that not all things are as bad as
they first seem? Wouldn’t it be our best representation of Christ be to accept
things we didn’t like with a positive attitude?
How wrong we were.
Three of my team members, Alex, Jonathan and Carrie ended up
having to leave early for this weekend, to prepare a “surprise” for the rest of
us. Michele, Stephanie, Mary and I left a few hours later. We hiked our stuff
through the streets of Odessa and got on a bus with about 15 Ukrainian teenage
children. As usual, they immediately stared at us Americans.
“Great.” I thought, sarcastically. “This should be fun.”
After an hour long bus ride, where we passed oceans of
sunflower fields, I think our perspective was beginning to look up. After all,
how can one see a golden sea so joyous and NOT be optimistic?
When we finally arrived to the remote village, and hiked our
way to the water’s edge (which was another twenty minute hike through complete
wilderness. . . minus trees) we arrived at “camp.” That is where our hopes for
a fun weekend began to dim, because immediately we were loosely informed that “Extreme Camp” wasn’t just camping out at a lake with no facilities but rather
was actually more like “Survivor”, where we were split into two teams and
forced to compete for food.
The weekend quickly degenerated from there, as team Koinonia had originally been broken up
evenly, with Michele, Steph and I on one team, and Alex, Jonathan, and Carrie
on the other. We played some games (if I can call them games, because some of
them really weren’t fun at all, and I like to think of the term “game” as
something one would want to do if they wanted to have fun.) These games, we
found, became necessary to win if we wanted to eat.
The “Surprise” we found to be a giant mud pit, where we were
forced to crawl on our belly through with food in our mouths. That was only one
of the many trials we were forced to participate in this weekend. Others
included scaling a thirty to forty feet sheer cliff hill, amongst thorns and
thistles and loosely packed earth that would slide out from underneath your
feet, to grab our food from the top. That was probably the most dangerous thing
we did that weekend, as a few people really got hurt, (Steph nearly twisted her
ankle and wasn’t allowed to participate in the other games, which meant that
they were down one person.) They sent us out into the village to beg for money
to “purchase” lost team members back. One of my least favorite games was what I
called the “Vineyard” game, where the youngest member of our team had been “Kidnapped” and hidden in a Grape Vineyard near where we had been camping. After a six am wake up whistle, we were on
the hunt, freezing and disoriented. Completely unprepared.
Oh, and did I mention that all of this came at the price of
NO TRANSLATIONS? Our Ukrainian captors thought it would add a special “element”
to the game if the kids on our team had to somehow explain the games to six
completely lost Americans. Isn’t that fun?
Weekends like this would be tough as it is, sleeping in a
tent in the middle of nowhere on the side of a slanted hill. Only one tree to
BARELY serve as shade from the boiling hot sun, and plenty of snakes and giant
insects to go around. Cooking food over a camp fire, and using the wilderness
as your toilet might be fun if you
had the right company, who could actually understand you.
But throw a team, who is having struggles connecting anyway,
into a situation like “Survivor” camp, and you can only EXPECT dissention. The hardest part about this weekend (for me,
at least) was how Koinionia had been split apart, and even though we started
off the weekend in a three by three by one split (there was an extra person, so
Mary had to live with the adults at the camp and wasn’t able to participate in
the games) by the end of the weekend, I found myself on the same team as Alex,
Jonathan and Carrie, and poor Stephanie and Michele were left alone with
Ukrainian teenagers. (who, may I add, were simply AMAZING. Stephanie and
Michele both admitted later that if it wasn’t for the boys on their team, they
would have cracked.)
When we finally returned back home (interesting, isn’t it,
how after only three weeks in a place, you immediately begin to call it “home”) we had a “vent session,” amongst our teammates, because you CAN’T be
in a situation like this and NOT be dis-unified. We talked about how we all disappointed one
another, because maybe some of us didn’t try as hard as others to stay unified,
or maybe some of the other team members thought we should have shared more of
our food. . . etc. etc.
This was a hard weekend, no doubt. But during that venting
session I confessed how much I HATED being split apart from the other members
of Koinonia. I went into this weekend not feeling very connected to them, but I
came out of it even MORE loyal to stay the course with them. We had just been
through HELL together. (Reading this, you may think I am exaggerating when I
say we all called this place “Extreme fishing death camp of doom”, so please
understand, funny title aside. This was NOT fun for us.) We had somehow
survived this weekend in the blazing heat with water rationed. We competed in
RIDICULOUS activities that even healthy, strong, youth kids had a hard time
with. Somehow, things like this make me THRIVE in community. So I came out of
this exercise feeling even MORE like a team, and loving my teammates so much
better than I had before.
My team leader, Alex put it best. He pointed at me and said, “Well I guess, if that was the only reason
that we had to go through this, so that you could connect. . . well. Glory to
God.”
Indeed. Glory to God.
