here it is.
Last weekend I went up north to near Saint-Louis for G.O.R. (Guys On
Retreat a.k.a. the hairy men's weekend). On Friday morning a small group
of us left the school in Jens's Renault estate. We were 6: Jens,
Johannes, Tobi, Josh, myself and Jonathan, parent of some of our day
students. We were sent off with a tupperware box full of burgers and
chips by Jonathan's wife Wendy and Jens's wife Coni after morning break.
I should have been teaching period four but I had scheduled a test and
so it was simple enough to get someone to cover for me, although I got
complaints on Monday when the kids complained I hadn't warned them about
it (it was supposed to be a surprise test but word had got out when some
of them started questioning me one lesson so they suspected it was
coming but weren't sure when).
The drive up to Saint-Louis is about four hours and we stopped en-route
in Louga to meet up with some of the other guys who were meeting for
lunch in a restaurant there. We had of course already enjoyed our
burgers and chips, precariously passed between the three rows of seating
in the car. The school kitchen had been very gracious to us in starting
lunch preparation early so that we wouldn't miss out on what the rest of
the school were getting for lunch (burgers and chips is very rare, it's
rice 75% of the time).
We arrived at our final meeting point mid afternoon where we had to get
a small boat (a pirogue) out to the island where we were staying. It
took too boat loads to get all of us and our luggage across, there were
about 34 of us from all over Senegal. At Saint-Louis the Senegal river
meets the sea but just before it does it makes a bit of a dog leg which
has created a kind of peninsula about 15km long and probably between
300m and 1km wide for the majority of its length. Due to problems with
flooding the river was engineered to go straight out to sea by basically
cutting through this peninsula at the end and making it into an island.
It is this island on which the campement is situated where we spent our
weekend.
I was a little apprehensive before the weekend about spending a weekend
with so many Americans. I've never had any male American friends and
have a bit of a stereotype about them, especially Christians. I was very
glad to have my stereotype shattered as I realised they were actually
quite normal and I was able to get on very well with them.
The actual retreat started with putting us in teams for a competition
which would last the rest of Friday and most of Saturday. At this point
I was again worried by the thought of macho Americans in competition,
especially when I heard the first event would be a group tally of
sit-ups, press-ups and pull-ups. My fears were however allayed when I
met my team who were half from the UK and nearly all geeks in some way
or other. Despite this we did manage to get ourselves into the
competitive mindset and soon set to work on the physical challenge and
also the mental challenge of a sudoku, word search and anagrams.
Strangely enough we actually came out with a massive lead after the
first events, mainly due to a lot of sit-ups. One member, Jonathan,
happened to be a strange breed of athletic geek and did 150 sit-ups, the
most done by anyone, and I somehow managed to push myself to 100,
although I felt it for the next four days every time I got up, sat down
or walked anywhere.
Each team was given a flag which they had to decorate. Our flag was
white and so we decided to call ourselves 'No Surrender!' and decorated
our white flag with a variation on the no-smoking sign containing an
upturned dove of peace holding an olive branch.
As guys on retreat we mainly indulged in two things, competition and
meat. The food at the campement was excellent. Each evening we dined on
a three course meal followed by attaya (Senegalese tea), according to
our waiters, who announced so very dramatically after each meal, the tea
was as follows: "le premier est amer comme la mort, le deuxieme est doux
comme la vie et le troisieme est mielleux comme l'amour" (trans. - "the
first is bitter like death, the second, sweet like life, the third,
honeyed like love"). In fact the attaya was weak compared to what it
should be, probably for the tourists' palate (toubab-attaya). On
Saturday they prepared a barbeque for us with prawns, beef, chicken,
fish, sausages and baked potatoes and on Sunday they roasted two sheep
over a fire and made a broth from it served with couscous.
The other parts of the competition were frisbee cricket, golf and
rubbish collecting (I nearly wrote 'trash' there...). We did well with
the frisbee and not so well at the golf whilst being middle of the road
in trash collecting (some groups picked up concrete and scrap metal
giving them an unfair advantage weight-wise). At the end of the Saturday
afternoon we were still in the lead but only by one point and so it all
came down to the last event, the team song. There were fifty bonus
points on offer for the best team song and we didn't want to lose.
Thankfully we had some very talented lyricists and musicians on our team
and after three hours of brainstorming we had a song to beat all songs
(Eurovision here we come). The songs were performed after tea that night
and I was worried that people wouldn't vote for us, seeing as we were
winning, but people were fair and we ran away with it by a large margin.
I'm still surprised that I was part of a winning team on a weekend for
hairy men.
The Sunday was a more reflective time and we sang together in the
morning and shared communion. One of the guys shared with us about a
part of what biblical manhood is about. We also had a very encouraging
time together on Saturday night after the songs when we had a bonfire
and people shared testimony of what God had been doing in them over the
weekend and over the year. It was great to spend time with other
Christian men, enjoying being men together and enjoying being Christians
together. The fact that we were all missionaries was an extra bonus.
I'm sad that I shall not be here next year for the next one.
No comments:
Post a Comment