Sumer Camp, Part 1

[parasitegirl]

I came back from camp in one piece. Actually, I came back with more than I left. In a few days the horrible swelling of my ankle will go down, the mystery bug bite will subside, and the tube-like flesh will no longer be hot to the touch. Of course I am assuming that the thick amber liquid that is beginning to seep from the epicenter of it is a sign that it is healing and the poison is draining. In a week I’ll be able to wear shorter skirts without the plum-blue bruise on my inner thigh making me look like I’ve been beaten in a very private way. These both would be less noticeable if I wasn’t so darned pale, but on days like this it seems that my skin tone was designed to best offset bruises, scratches, and swollen rashes. I’m a white wash gallery of missteps and imprinted motions, a catalogue of objects I have encountered full force.

 

I survived Kiddy Cat fun camp in Nigatta prefecture, thank you. I killed no children. In fact I never even snapped. My former co-worker and current friend, Jimmy, has admitted that he was totally floored when he saw me popping my head above the bus seats (on the bus ride to the camp) to entertain the little girl behind me, the sounds of my voice kindly chiding as I said “Noooooo you’re the little monster, not me…ONI CHILD!!!” “Didn’t know you had it in you,” he said more than once. Jimmy had expected at least one sighting of growling Kayt with coffee in hand saying “Get away from me, kid, you bother me.” Or a single scream of “Fuck~!” in an otherwise silent gym. Jimmy planned to turn to whatever shocked adult was standing near by and explain, “She’s in transition…she’s used to high school students…” He got me the gig and thought it would be good for me, but he didn’t have much faith.

 

But if I am to be honest I will admit this, on day two I had to excuse myself from one activity with my team, Team Peach, to hide in a toilet stall and gain my composure.

 

Let’s start at the beginning.

 

Tuesday night: Jimmy and I took a slow train up to Ota city in Gunma. The train ride lasted two hours and wasn’t so bad. I’d worried about spending so much time with Jimmy. I’ve mentioned that I think of him as a little brother, a little brother who thinks dirty words and words that sound vaguely dirty are a grand source for laugh and a little brother who believes Bad Boys 2 (Too bad for words) is an ideal movie….We made immature jokes and amused ourselves with the fact that once we hit the total boonies my breasts had become major focal points for people on the train.

 

We arrived one stop away from Ota around 11 at night and walked to that night’s crash pad. The area is seriously middle of fucking nowhere. Jimmy lived there for a year before coming down to Matsudo. I’m surprised he didn’t lose his fucking mind, I would have. He showed me exciting sites like the laundromat and where a severely mentally disabled guy used to stand and drool as the schoolgirls went by each morning. We stayed with a usually drunk female friend of his in Gunma (this girl has a habit of getting drunk and making out with bathroom attendants at Tokyo clubs…or so I was told). The apartment was pretty rank and nasty. We were both happy to get fresh air in the morning.

 

Wednesday Morning
We awoke early. Jimmy and I have opposite wake up strategies. If I have to wake up early in the AM I do it as fast as possible. I want to hit that alarm, take a power shower, gulp down my food, and leave. This insures that I can sleep until the last minute possible and still make it to where ever in time. Jimmy is a wake up and slowly get out of the hour, drink some juice, watch some news, slowly emerge from the house sort of person. Jimmy was in charge and he watched as I got increasingly more fidgety before we finally left the apartment.

 

Part of getting ready in the morning involved putting on our uniforms, the polo shirts we’d been sent that would help distinguish us from the students (that and the obvious 10-20 year age difference.) Prior to this moment I don’t recall the last time I owned a polo shirt. I don’t like them and, unless they are tight, they aren’t exactly flattering on me. They tend to hang down from my shoulders and breasts in a way that makes me look rotund. Jimmy and I both got two men’s medium sized shirts, navy-blue and red. The first moment I saw them I knew I would hate them. Jimmy looked fine in his. I’m shorter and smaller than Jimmy. I put mine on and the image of “Pat” the gender mystery character of former SNL skits sprang to mind. Jimmy pretty much confirmed that a blue polo shirt too big to tuck into my baggy khaki pants made me look pretty fucking frumpy. He giggled. I proceeded to send many grumpy morning text messages to Wataguy explaining that I looked and felt like a “fucking golftard.”

 

At the train station to Ota we met a former student of Jimmy’s who remembered him, a developmentally disabled student to be exact. I have at times wondered what English classes with developmentally disabled students are like. From what I gathered while we waited, they are very loud and involve lots of vocabulary games. Until the train arrived we discussed categories of things with this student. 

 

Student: Melon!

Jimmy: Apple

Student: PEACH!

Jimmy: Grapes

Student: …Orange!

Kayt: Watermelon

Student: MELON!

 

I knew once we reached Ota we would have to take a bus to the camp site, but because I still tend to have a rather abstract concept of the distance between point A to point B in Japan (and had not looked at a map) I didn’t know we’d be on a bus with 50+ students for three and ½ hours (the total number of students at the camp was over 110, there were multiple busses coming from other stations as well).

 

Once out of the trainstation at Ota, Jimmy and I snagged the front seats of our huge buss and were able to ignore the children until we were able to cope. Some other ALT’s and councilors were also at the front of the bus. About and hour and some change was eaten up by playing a new crappy Disney movie, Brother Bear, on the bus monitors. We later pointed out that a movie which teaches us the spiritual goodness of bears and ends with people and bears dancing together was perhaps not the best thing to show children right before we arrived in the mountains at a camp where we’d all been warned to take extra precautions against bears. Our camp schedule specifically advised us, Make sure to bring the bells to avoid seeing a bear emerge out of the forest on day two when we would be orienteering with our groups.

 

When Brother Bear ended I was ready to bond with the children. They fed me copious amounts of sugary candy in exchange for my kindness. I ate the candy, not knowing if I would be seeing vegetarian friendly food at the camp facilities.

 

We got off the bus and began to meet the other ALT’s/ Foreigners. The 16 of us formed an amazingly solid group. There was an even distribution of sarcasm, wackiness, coffee drinkers, body images, energy levels and my need to have meatless food was supported by Amechi, a fellow American, who needed to have his Muslim food restrictions respected. Usually at these sorts of things you get quite a few wankers and tossers and inevitably the worst one there is from your home country and makes you feel that you must apologize for the sins of your fellow Americans/Kiwis/Aussies or what not. It’s the Murphy’s Law of being a foreigner in Japan. Jimmy and I were both very surprised at being with such a damned fine group.

 

We dropped our bags off near our mildewy bunk beds and headed to the then each of us went to the Play Hall (or as Jimmy kept giggling at the pronunciation…the “play HOLE!”) and met our teams of seven or eight students. These kids would be our responsibility for the next 48 hours. We would eat with them and participate in competitive activities with them and at the end of the 48 hours there would be a tallying of points from such activities as group introduction, flag making, story writing, and orienteering and the three winning teams would get prizes.

 

My team was team Peach. We had two boys and six girls ranging from age eight to 13. These kids were to soon become the underachievers of the camp events. We were not the last team in anything, but that’s just because of team Angel, a group of seven seven year olds too young to participate fully in all events. Whenever an event score was revealed I would make a big show of high fives, sticker giving, and cheering for our pathetically truncated score. And I would remind Saki, the 13-year-old team leader, that at least we’d beaten the Angels.

 

After flags had been made, dinner had been eaten, and we’d participated in various games and songs, the kids went to bed and we hit the communal baths. We were not the only people using the facilities so three of us (one Chinese lady, one Jamaican, and myself) emerged from the shower/bather area to be greeted by screams and laughs of hyper middle-school kids who had naked foreigners. Luckily we were all normal sized foreigners with good body images who were able to ignore it. Unfortunately the next foreigner to enter the bathing area, a Midwest girl (who I must admit has one of the disproportionably largest asses I’ve ever seen) wasn’t so sure of herself and spent the next night trying to plan an attack trip on the showers when no one else would be there…she never succeeded.

 

Then group of nine of us foreign girls and boys of us passed many hours with a can of chu-hi each playing some very competitive Uno. I’ve never been party to so much trash talking and name calling at a child’s card game involving no cash. It was wonderful.

 

Around 1AM we called it a night. We all had to be up at 7:00 am. The schedule clearly read that every morning at 7:00 there would be an Uprising! We would need our rest to overthrow the powers that be. I tucked myself into my bunk and then preceded to learn that one of my fellow Americans has the loudest fucking snore in the world…my earplugs were not able to fully kill the sound.

 

Thus ended Wednesday.