GCD Competency - Wilderness Engagement

Action Week!

For year 10 action week, we had gone to Chiang Mai province, from the 9th to the 14th of December. This trip had taught me many amazing things and had led me to become closer to loads of my peers. We had worked together in the activities we had done throughout the trip and helped each other by solving any problems we had faced along the way. During the trip, every student had to share their tent with one or two of their friends. I had shared my tent with Darin, who I had just gotten to know towards the start of year 10. I decided to share my tent with her as I wanted to become closer to new people and we had a lot of fun bonding and getting to know each other during this trip. At the start, I was not completely sure of how well this was going to be, as I was not very close to Darin, but in the end, I had gotten a lot closer to her and we this may have helped start a new friendship. I was very excited about this trip since day one, as it was an adventure that I would get to experience with new people and most importantly, have fun. This experience has taught me a lot about the wilderness outside of Bangkok and how to work well with people for four days.

The feeling in Chiang Mai was completely different from Bangkok. I had gotten to see new sights and colors around and inside the jungle. It was so quiet and peaceful compared to the packed city of Bangkok. We had gotten to Chiang Mai by overnight train. This had been one of the best experiences I had in a long time as I had the chance to be with new people and travel in a completely new way.

In this new location, we had gotten to discover some amazingly beautiful sights that we could not have seen anywhere else. This whole experience had taught me a lot about collaboration skills with my team (who I was not very close to before) and how to connect to each other while doing all of the activities. By collaborating with all the people in my pod and group, I have learnt to work with them in team-building activities on the first day, the trek on the second and third day and we even cooked together during our nights in Chiang Mai.

Overall, collaboration within this experience will help me a lot in the future. It will help me in class for any teamwork activities and in the sports that I can play for falcons at NIST. An example of this is that I may have to work with a partner or peers I have never worked with before, in class. I will have had experience this from being roommates with someone who I wasn't very close to in camp and also still trying my best to get to know the team and work together to complete the task that we are assigned. One of the main team building activities from action week was to complete an obstacle course where we had to find a solution to get the ball to the other side of the court, using specific materials. That has helped me become a lot closer to my teammates and taught me that sometimes, you can just find the best solution to a problem, by working together.

Regarding my experience in the wilderness, in Chiang Mai, it allowed me to see that I am actually a city person and love the wilderness, but would never be able to live in it. This experience allowed me to switch off, change the way that I think of other people, and other environments around the world and showed me that everyone has their own way or preference of living. In the future, I will always want the chance to go into wilderness every once in a while to switch off and gain new experiences, however, this will not be on a daily basis as I would still love to live in the city. Before I went on this trip, I never thought that I would be able to spend an extended period in the wild, with no technology or connection to my family in any way, but after this amazing trip, I have learned what it is like to live in the wilderness for a few days and have fun by communicating with others rather than being on my phone or laptop. I had not gone into the wilderness for a long time before this, so I was quite scared to go back, especially for a longer period of time and without any communication with my parents, but by going on this trip, I became close to so many more people, and built many connections to the environment. This shows me that whenever I am in a new environment, even if I am not as comfortable with the location, I can always rely on others to have fun and go through with it.