Summer Camp

Sometimes our expectations are different from reality. Last summer, I participated to the JROTC summer camp. I expected I would have a fun time playing volleyball, swimming and making new friends. But in addition, the summer camp gave me the opportunity to learn many valuable skills.

I was looking forward to participating the JROTC summer camp for a whole year. I was very excited to go because I knew that it would be a unique experience for me. The first day I was in the camp, I felt ambivalent. I was afraid because I would be separated from my own friends; but I would learn to be independent and would make more new friends. The first day of the camp we just had fun with each other. The raining began on the second day of the camp.

The beginning of the training day was tough for me. We woke up at five oÐŽ¦clock in the morning. It was ridiculous for me. When I am at home, I usually wake up at ten oÐŽ¦clock. We had an hour to prepare ourselves and clean up the dorm after we woke up. We had a clean-up competition everyday. The second horrible experience came next. We had to march for two

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and a half miles to the mess hall to have breakfast, then march back to the dorm. It was extremely miserable when I was marching two and a half miles with my new pair of boots.

The training courses were arduous. We had to do a variety of army training. The one which contributed the most of my personal sense of achievement was Land Navigation. We had had a lesson to learn how to read a map and learned to use a compass before we did the mission. We were divided into a group to learn and a group to do the mission. Our group consisted of three people. I worked with my other two teammates. I didnÐŽ¦t know how to use the compass at the beginning. Also, it was difficult for me to get along with one of my teammates in the mission. During the mission, we had to go into a small forest, then we used our compasses to find some designed points from the map. After that we had to find roads to walk back to the terminal point.