1st Day Experience YMP Booth camp

The first day was awesome, first I came into the classroom excited but of course a little bit nervous, then I realized that me and my friend Donovan were the first ones to get there so Shaka asked us to go outside and help him by guiding the other students to the building.

After we were done with the task we entered the building once again to join the classroom, we noticed that everyone had created circles already and they were having their own conversations so we just sat in the back of the room and waited for the day to start. We started of the day with a warm up exercise, after that we did a series of ice breaking activities were we had to share some personal information, however I didn’t have any problem with that and I actually felt in a safe environment to talk freely. Later we ate lunch, the food was good, during lunch me and my friend actually got closer to one of the circles that shared some of our interests.

We then proceeded to do some team building activities, first we got into a group and tried to lift a stick using only the tip of our fingers, it sounded like an easy task  but after many efforts my team gave up and stopped trying, it was frustrating.

Then we broke up the groups and created new ones to start a new team building activity, this one was very exciting. The theme was the beginnings of Hip-Hop, we had to create a block with our groups and we had to incorporate buildings to develop a society. There were other blocks though, and they were capable of fighting or “beefing” us to gain advantages, like stealing our buildings or sending our members to jail. I don’t really know a lot about Hip-Hop because my music orientation is based more in the rock world and classic, but I do know a lot of strategy, so with my team we came up with a game plan. I told them that we long as we didn’t draw any attention to us we would be fine so we sent our best man to answer  the Hip-Hop based questions to get us the supplies we needed and then we started building our community, once we were done, we hid all our buildings and we just sat back as we watched the other teams destroying each other. At the end of the game we won because we were the only team that managed to keep all of its members out of jail and we also had all the buildings.

I truly enjoyed the first day and I also learnt a lot about diversity and it was great to see that there were so many people with different backgrounds and opinions in every topic. I am looking forward to the rest of this new adventure and I hope I make new friends to share this odyssey with.