heyhey! back this morning from matriculation camp (Apprentice camp), first part of the whole ACTStrinsic package. lol.
lemme start from sunday morning;)
sunday morning we woke up and met at tamp mrt station. ate lunch together, got to noe the team pple:D my team (we're call SIXY;););) consists of me, michelle, jiexian, qiaoping, kavita, christine, robert, kenneth, huanyan and edwin:) our facilitators are jieyun and johnathan (JJ!) lol. then went to tamp safra and played games. 8 different games:)
very refreshing game actually. hahahaa. some games are just..erm. quite testing on the knees. our knees were a bit wobbly after the games. lol. but we've kinda started to bond:) my team is small (only 10 pple! other teams have 12, 15! 8 teams in all btw.), but we have lots of potential. lol. we have pple who are loud, pple who are soft, agile, smart, new, veteran..blah. lol. and we're all very accomodating pple.
yay!:D
then we had a most altruistic journey thing whereby we actually went house to house (u're supposed to think of wat to do urself, so the things each team does differs:D) to give out coffee packets and encouraged them to drink coffee with their family or to pass on the coffee packet to neighbours. this component wasn't really good, i felt. but i think it gave the organisers time to actually prepare for the night game.
lol. dinner came and went. and we were at aloha changi chalet! the one facing the road:)
NIGHT GAME! lol. it's a trading war;) lots of things. we ran A LOT. we ran from the chalet to changi village then back again 'cos we can't find the elusive shannavar to trade for textiles. all of us had 10 000 spanish silvers at first. wasted 2 game months (only had 12 to finish game). and we kept getting intercepted by our dear adorable pirates. (they really looked the role) ah. we got intercepted by them like.. 6 times:P
anyway as i was saying, we ran a lot. 'cos nidded to get crude oil and rubber and metal (i think) to trade for plastic and alloys and goodness noes wat to make automobiles..of which we will then liquidize the automobiles and earn spanish silvers. ran a span of 5 bus stops over and over. wahaha. the worst thing is tt the whole team is surrounded by strings and cardboards to keep us together. gosh. 2 hours of running. someone estimated we might have ran for more than 4.8km. perfect for dieting pple:P
yay. really wasted the time at first. nvm
and at night! argh. was falling off to sleep (finally!) at 2.30am when they woke everyone up. segment d of apprentice camp. lol. had to do puzzles and read comprehension and solve qns and do tangrams. intention was to train up our skills in being able to think in tired and stressful conditions (required for an entrepreneur). btw, we were all given points for the activites we do. Sixy never went past 4th position. lol
the next day. woke up at 7am to off the aircon, then at 9am to brush teeth. lol.
wahahaa. second day was... BEACH GAMES! got quite touching moments actually. beach games were very physically draining. as they said, it was when we let our muscles do the talking.
very shocked by kenneth and edwin in some segment of the beach games. kenneth actually ran blindfolded into the water. nono. he banged into another person. immediately picked himself up and continued running..but into the water. robert commented later on tt he didn't noe whether to applaud kenneth or to bash him up. the rest of us were just in shock. think nearly cried out.
edwin also. had to blow this stupid pingpong ball across the stretch of the beach. then he just kept going...saw tt his hands were red from rubbing against the sand.
oh! lemme share our moment of glory. LOL. there was this last segment on how we have to blow balloons and burst these balloons. we were the first team to finish. kenneth ran to get the scores for us. and when he was running, NO OTHER TEAM SENT PPLe to start running. wahahaa. moment of glory. one solitary person running on sand. first and only event tt happened. tt no one else was fighting to get the top score from the pool in the middle of the beach. wahaha.
after tt was lunch. at 3+4+!!!. lol. then we had to analyse Djokoli's (through a thick stack of info on the country) political, economical and social situation and draw out a proposal for a social entrepreneur project into the country, with a starting capital of S$50k in 2 hours.
i really like the proposal we drew up actually:) we're thinking of setting up a shoe factory in the southern part of djokoli (why southern part. 'cos we read tt most of the terrorists and bombings are from the northern part where the muslims are from the news reports...so being in the southern part, we will have a higher chance of not being bombed and actually allow the factory to survive:) we'll be manufacturing shoes because of two reasons -1)latex is readily available in Djokoli 2)we nid hides to do the shoes and most likely the animals they're importing are cows (or camels 'cos of increasing desertification). lol
we will then market these shoes with a brand name. 'cos our shoes will have unique african design (hand sewn) to appeal to the afro-american crowd in USA. the factory will be labour intensive (to help reduce the 60% pple under poverty line). labour intensive is good 'cos dun have to spend money on training the pple up till very high and the cost of machinery is low. the labour cost is already low. they only get like $12 per month for salary(minimum wage rate)...we'll give them $15 and increase as the factory expands:)
in the same time, we'll be having a two pronged approach. we'll also be setting up a social club in the hub of Sangui (the capital of the country) to help to direct girls who came into the city to work to right jobs. we offer them an alternative lifestyle. they come to work for us, they get more than wat others offer and in the same time, we can train them up. this club is set up also to educate the girls abt their rights, give them a career... we aim to help them break through the mentality tt girls are inferior to males and tt they're only created to marry and give birth. the club will be sponsored by the factory to keep it running.
our ultimate aim after 5-10 years is to train up the pple in Djokoli to be able to actually take care of the factory and the clubthemselves, for ultimately it is their land and they'll understand the situation better as well. also the pple in Djokoli can relate better to their own race of people. We wanna also inculcate the belief that they themselves can actually change the country on their own. they can mould society's thinking. they can make the change.
we kinda modelled it after gen-acts club (whereby the director is Julian Lee, a social entrepreneur himself)... gen-acts has been setting up clubs in Chile, Peru and Equador to help the people in shanty towns, in villages.
cool sia.
anyway. the question and answer section was quite funny. i won't talk abt it.
ahh. cut things short. we got 5th overall for all the sections.
wahaha. then we were supposed to use the points we accumulated to bid for the place we'll sell our things at during the 'Who wants to be an entrepreneur' event and bid for permits for the things we can sell. wahahahahaha. we got 5 permits. wahahhaa. we're the only team to have more than 2 permits. LOL.
our team was on euphoria tt night basically. lol. went for supper at changi village. oh! me and kenneth and huan yan decided to take the same module at the first semester --- history. lol. and for singapore studies as well. LOL.
after supper. we went to the beach. not sleeping 'cos we wanted to catch sunrise. lol. talked through the night. lol. 5 hours+. we talked about quite a lot of stuff close to us. hehe. a lot abt relationships and all. buried feet in sand. i got buried in sand:P whole body. feels good actually. lol. me and kenneth have ard the same sleepy times. 12-1+ is our sleepy time and 5+ is another sleepy time for us. so next time can really study together. 'cos we'll be sleepy at the same time. LOL
yesh. sunrise is nice. but we didn't see much of the sun. lol.
then we went for breakfast at tamp macS! wahaha. first team to set off. started discussing business for sunday there. we're really mad pple;)
mad pple with a vision. yesh.