As part of being a New Zealand Girl Guide leader, we are supposed to take them camping regularly, both inside (camping on roll mats in a hall or hut and cooking in an actual kitchen) and outside (camping in tents and cooking outside).
This year one of the other leaders, Meghan, decided to complete her Camp Cert and take our unit as well as a few girls from another unit to Titahi Bay, just up the coast from Island Bay. We have about 12 girls in our unit who were joined by three from another unit, so we had a nice number of girls for our camp. The theme was ‘Rubber Ducks’ (the girls chose that, not us) so we tried to make our activities fit in with this theme…we didn’t manage it very well but we tried!
So turning up to Guide Camp with a raging hangover is not my all-time best move, but thankfully my role for the weekend was ‘Camp Cook’, so I just barricaded myself in the kitchen and touch food all weekend…or something like that. I was happy to just be dealing with the food rather than the tweens.
The girls begun the weekend with a briefing and thinking about the rules of the camp. In GirlGuiding we like the girls to have an input into the rule making so that they feel a part of it, plus if they break the rules we can turn it around and tell them that they made the rules so they need to stick to them!
Thankfully we didn’t have to do too much telling off or reminding of the rules.
Throughout the weekend, the girls took part in activities such as:
– Crafting cards for their parents; they made ‘rubber duck’ cards!?
– Cooking potatoes in a hay box; using the old-school method of cooking food in a hay box (used during World War II to conserve rationed food). to show the girls that even if you don’t have a lot of fuel to cook with, you can still end up with good food! We used the mashed up potatoes for dinner that night.
– Making ice cream in a tin; using the same ingredients that you would usually use to make ice cream, you put them all in a bag and then put that in a big bag of ice and rock salt…then you put the whole lot in a big tin and just keep rolling it! This was suprisingly effective and the girls really enjoyed their pudding.
– They went for a short walk to Titahi Bay for a run around.
– The patrols took part in a scavengar hunt around the hut.
– Everyone sung a lot.
They seemed to enjoy the activities, so I suppose that’s a successful camp!
We did have one issue with people hanging around the hut (there were a few scary looking guys hanging around outside…we did get the police to come and move them along!), but none of the girls woke up and we had a great time apart from that.
My food making skills are fairly basic, but I did have a lot of fun cooking for the camp. We had Chili, Pita bread pizzas, cheesy pasta and a lot of cake and fruit! I had a lot of fun making the large amounts of food required and apparently the girls all said how much they enjoyed my meals.
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