Basketball at Midnight

I just returned from English Camp, which is a 48-hour (3 day) ETA-run “camp” at a resort for all participating schools.  We had 25 students from each of 6 schools and ran with the theme of “Space”: that all the kids were separated into delegations from various planets that must come together and work out a trade agreement.  It didn’t go as smoothly as I’d prefer, and we lost a lot of usable time in various chaoses.  We also lost some nifty planned events, like a Leadership Council that would focus on crafting a “shared, honorable culture of peace” while each planet was working out their own specific culture.  It was, at the very least, a lot of games, joking around, screaming with my hands waving above my head, and a handful of worthwhile events mixed in there somewhere.  The kids were randomly assigned to a “home planet” (mixed evenly between schools); the Jedi (ETA) in charge wrote a few paragraphs describing the planet, but several events over the course of the weekend focused on having the kids build their own “culture” from the framework, including norms, history, and mythology.  We also had activity rotations that were just for English-y fun (like Karaoke) or team-building (my event, where they had to get everyone across a river of lava with only two boards).  I was the Jedi of the Barapians (from Berapi, “fire” in Malay; they were people who lived in mountains around the many volcanoes on their planet) .

Now, back at my apartment, I’m in my melancholy-after-community mood: pensive, reflective, and a little sad.  This is, for those who don’t know, quite normal for me, and in some ways a sign that it was a valuable experience. It is a frequent mood after Community Dinners,  road trips to visit family and friends, and most other events in which a “sacred space” is formed in wich I join  a community that manages to actively interact away from the everyday world.  To help you understand, actively interact might be replaced with “understand and bond with people on a deeper level than usual contact allows”; while that’s often the case, that deeper level isn’t necessarily required (and might not actually apply to Space Camp).  Yet, there’s something about the experience that requires one to be more conscious of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it– to be more active in their interactions.   Maybe it makes them do something they’re not use to or to see something from a different persepctive than they’re use to, and then again, sometimes it’s just because the enviroment is that much different and there’s a certain added awareness.  Whatever it is, it is that type of thing that brings my somewhat melanacholic mood afterwards.

It happens frequently whem I’m travelling, and there were times in Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and even the mere 28 hours I spent in KL last weekend, when I fell right in with the folks in my guest house and with an Indian-Malaysian blogger I met there.   To some degree, that’s also been mainly missing from my interactions with the ETAs and probably one of my biggest let-downs of the program (although the ETAs are fine enough people, most of our escapes from the everyday stressors have not been meaningful on the lame level).  For the kids, I feel it has been more of a lack of opportunity, since my interaction outside of the structured setting is limited.  If only there were more ways to steal kids away