Definition (after)
Olympiadas - an awesome demonstration of team spirit and a great way to get to know new people. A great way to teach the kids team work and that hard work pays off and is something to be proud of.
Well, its Sunday and Olympiadas is finally over. I am feeling a little bit like I always do after a big race: what now? Our days have been filled with preparations and now that it is over, what do I do with myself? Unlike after a race, I am pretty confident that this feeling will not last more that 24 hours. I am going to be very happy to have time for myself.
The Olympiadas activities began on Friday with presentations from each team. I was very poorly informed on what the presentation was supposed to contain. My team just told me to make up a dance. Which I did. They tried to tell me that the dance should be 7 min. long, which seemed like an absurdly long dance to me and I know that nobody wants to see me dance for that long, so our dance was 2 min and 50 seconds. (This was also the maximum capacity of dance moves that my fellow teammates and dancers could memorize. Not surprising since they were all between the ages of 8 and 13) Well, I found out on Friday night (way too late!) that we were supposed to develop a “show” presenting our country and value (Jamaica and peace, in our case) that included a dance. This is very different than just making up a dance. There were some amazing presentations and of course we were sandwiched right in between 2 of the best. However, we had fun and didn’t completely humiliate ourselves, just partially. Every team had to make a flag representing their country and value and there were some pretty amazing flags, including ours, which I can say because I had nothing to do with it. They began the night with a flag presentation in which a representative from each team circled the auditorium waving the flags. It was much cooler than I can put into words. Although it was a little long, the night was really fun!
We woke up bright and early Saturday morning and went to a service in the church where we prayed for everyone’s safety during the games (at the time I had no idea how appropriate this was), they lit the olympiadas torch and blessed it with holy water. We then made our way down to the school where the games were held. My team began with the Deslizador, which was a giant slip and slide that had a basket ball hoop and the end. It was one of my favorite games. We only lost by one point. Next we went to the game named “Who is the king?”. This was designed as a boxing ring, without the protective side ropes, of course. The object of the game was to push your opponent off of the surface which was raised about 4 feet off the ground. As we were waiting our turn to play, an older girl (who is learning disabled and very uncoordinated) was forced off the edge and crashed to the ground twisting her ankle and bruising her knee…shocker! I am sorry to say that my team lost this game, but proud to say that nobody was able to push me off even when they ganged up on me 3 to 1. From there we moved to Hockey, which obviously the Hondurans are very unfamiliar with. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell them that there is a rule that the stick can not go above the shoulders and our game turned into a combination of hockey and baseball. I am shocked that nobody lost a full mouth of teeth. The next game was a giant obstacle course that involved a lot of running (love it!), crawling on the ground, and monkey bars (these are much more difficult as a fat old lady than they were as a small child). This was another of my favorites and my team actually did well. Next was the long jump and we elected 5 people from our team to represent us. Considering I can no longer jump more than a few inches off the ground, I was not elected to play. Next was the trivia challenge, which again we lost by only one point (you can begin to see the trend hereJ). Following that, we went to the very clever game named “Clean our environment”. I found this game very funny considering they gave us 3 trash bags and told us the object of the game was to fill the bags with trash laying around the school. They didn’t even time it. I must remember this cleaning tactic for future activities organized for kids. Afterwards, we got soaking wet playing a game that included removing the water from one barrel and putting it into another using giant sponges. And finally, we terminated the Olympic games with the tug of war in a giant mud pit. Our team didn’t even have a chance to win due to the fact that we were composed mostly of young kids and the other team of older kids and adults. It took about 15 seconds for the other team to drag all of us through the mud, but it was a blast and even the kids who had barely participated all day jumped into the mud to help out.
After lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon playing field day type games on the school basketball courts. It was a great flash back to elementary school with the 3 legged race, popping balloons by sitting on them, etc. Finally, at 4:00 we were able to drag ourselves back to the house, shower and nap before going to the awards party, but unfortunately, the party was rained out. It was a great weekend and although the preparation was time consuming and at times very frustrating, it was totally worth it!!
