Camp: week 1

Well, summer camp has begun!! Although instead of being overnight camp, it’s day camp, until camp camp opens, which may happen this week! It was a super fun week and a super exhausting week. The camp started at 9am with morning activities, songs and exercises. This was followed by a walk to Central Asia’s 2nd largest lake for swimming and castle building. Then back to school for lunch. Afterwards, the children had a rest from 1pm-4pm. I generally went home to have a rest also (and began wondering why I don’t live closer to my school…?) Then back to camp at 4pm for outside activities, crafts, movie time, dinner, discos, and free time until 8pm when I went back home. The bus I usually take home stops running at 8 again leaving me to wonder why I don’t live closer to my school…? One day I taught “duck, duck, goose” to the children; it was an exciting game and we played for a whole hour! I thought we had killed it, but the kids loved it, so I guess it wasn’t so bad:-) Free time was spent asking me to translate songs from English to Russian, this proved more difficult than I thought it would and we ended up playing Pictionary and Charades to understand what the song was saying. 

I think I will move out of my host family’s house soon and move closer to my work. At first, I was totally against this because it’s SO far away from the center of town and I was just going to move into my site mate’s apartment when he leaves in October, but I have warmed up to the idea and have had time to think about “integrating into my community” and about communities within communities. I feel like I have integrated into my larger community and even into my work community, but think I could do a better job if I lived closer…