Chapter 13: Camping, Part 3

One day, there was once a guy who did all the daily routine every morning and always get on time. That guy was, you guessed it, me! I’m the kind of guy you would love to meet all day because I don’t talk very often in a group because I’m an introvert. Guess the irony in that, you’ll get it. Ok, back to the serious stuff.

I, in a daily routine, assembled with everyone else joining the camp for a flag-raising ceremony. The flag wasn’t any of the countries that participated at the camp, i.e. Myanmar, Vietnam, or Malaysia, but it’s Thailand’s flag, which of course, some of you might know how it looks like, so no worries. After saluting the flag, we went on our way.

As usual, we’re going to do long, exhausting walks to reach our desired destination. We went to a place that’s focused on community development. It was really tiring! We went there from a hill, and hot sun with us, and unreliable water supply, because we didn’t see many mineral water vendors around. But, while our contingent was on the way. He’s like the kind of guy you want to talk with to distract yourself. We talked about Call of Duty, World War II, and about the PS4. We were really into that stuff and we discussed how to hack, real-life hacks, not computer hacks, to get the most out of life and stuff. We talked about all those stuff until we’ve reached the base of the hill. We were told to assemble in the court. The court was inside of a school, actually, and we were told to paint the stairs using red paint. It was basically useless because it was already painted in red but we did it anyway. And then, we relaxed, drunk water, surfed on the internet, turned on social media, and talked about what we liked best about this camping thing. It was kind of something like a neighborhood would do. Of course, as the name implies, we develop the community to be more organized and developed. And then, after that, we descended again down the curvy hill and took a break and to be prepared for the next activity: exhibition.

After that, after the lunch break is what I meant, we went to an exhibition. I wasn’t really into the ‘thing’ because of the one thing I really hated when I always go camping: stuff is lost. Just before the first or lunch break ends, my towel’s gone missing. I tried to find it but to no avail. What’s really fishy about the lost towel is that one of the towels has the color white, which is the color I usually use when I take a shower. But, despite that, I still thought that the towel might be someone else’s because that there’s a sticker type of sorts that, although normal and recognizable now, was to me, at first was strange. And the weirdness supported by the fact that the towel folded in an unusual way that I wasn’t used doing before. I kept on looking and looking but since I was running out of time, I eventually called off the search in a sad and worried expression covering all of my faces because I ‘thought’ that I couldn’t ‘find’ it.

Back to the exhibition part. I went there by foot, which wasn’t that far because it could’ve been only 200 or 300 meters away from my camp. We reached the place and it’s FULL of PEOPLE. It was boring, I got to be honest because all of a sudden I thought about the towel again. I went back with one of my friends to find my towel only to have my teacher tell me that the towel that was folded in a weird way was in fact mine. So, I breathed a sigh of relief, and I think dropped a tear a little bit. After all the announcements that were made to encourage us to help others was done, we head back to camp and entered the camp again only to find that we will perform onstage.

I considered wearing the cliché traditional clothing, Javanese clothing, I know, I know, and prayed first after I dressed up. It was quite nervous, though, because we’re going to have to perform in front of a thousand or so people. After I’m all dressed up and prayed, we were on our way towards the concert, on also seemingly towards a path of cringes all over everyone’s faces.

After that, we waited for the introduction to finish with all the grand performances and jokes and comedies performed; it was completely useless for the latter to be there, but hey, to each their own. But the first in line wasn’t us, but it was, in fact, Vietnam that gets to be first. It would’ve been really cool if we were first so that we could forget the cringe face from our lives. We were, in fact, the last one to perform, and that’s a bad thing considering the crowd was falling out of favor for us and the fact that some of us were really sleepy. We performed anyway after the whole debacle and I smiled the whole time because of a reflex from pure embarrassment and often crack a smile when doing it involuntarily.

After the performance I was in no more mood to do any more stuff but wait, there’s more. I, I mean we, listened to conversations between people on the stage and are often at a loss for words and we were actually quite impatient because of the absolutely freakish long time that we have to be there just to hear people bickering with each other. But also during that time, we watched performances, again, big surprise I know, a little bit too much, so logically we get bored. One of us slept so deeply that we have to wake him up just for him to open his eyes. It’s 11:00 PM and we still haven’t even stood up yet to end the whole thing and we actually have to wait for like, 30 more minutes at 11:30 when by that point, I lost a lot of faith in humanity already.

We stood up, some physically tired, some drowsy, or even some still on their ‘paradise’ inside their heads already, and we walked back to camp. We’ve reached there, and took a shower, brushed my teeth, and prayed, as usual, and let nature sink us down for 8 hours till the early morning.