Chrissy Renae

I think winter camp can best be summarized with this paragraph, taken from an email I sent to Ian earlier today in regards to the paper mache project…

“kids here are major perfectionists, so if one layer got screwed up they would tear off the whole thing and restart. they also don’t like getting messy, so dipping their hands and newspaper into flour water was reallly hard for them to handle. so they were making all these crazy faces and then ringing their hands and flipping paste all over the place, and then ripping wet newspaper off their balloons and then dropping the balloons on each other on accident and then trying to ask me questions about what to do next, which of course i couldnt decipher, and things were just getting so loud and CRAAZZZY and all of a sudden i started laughing and just couldn’t stop. i mean here we all were in this freeezing classroom (the heaters randomly stop working sometimes) and we all had newspaper and paste all over us and kids were crying cuz their fingers were too cold or mad cuz their balloons didn’t look perfect or giggling and throwing paste at each other and we were all totally unable to communicate with each other and it was just the funniest thing i’ve ever seen. i love imperfect moments like that to remind me that life isn’t really so serious.”

Most of english camp was full of times just like this, where it was much easier to laugh and appreciate the simplicity of life than bother getting frustrated with surprises, miscommunications, or language barriers. The kids are cute, we all had a fun time, they feel more confident in their English capabilities, and that’s all that really matters.