It begins about a month ago when we finally started practicing every single school day to prepare for the scouts tournament. And frankly, the result met our expectations. The competition is divided into 5, there’s Scouting Skill (where a group of 3 people will compete with skills related to scouts, such as morse code reading and signaling, semaphore code reading and signing, and compass reading and knowledge), Military Step Creation (where a group of 7 people were given a set of commands, up to the military standards. One person will give the commands as the drill commander, and 6 people will execute the commands given), Dance (where a group of 7 people will do a dance routine following a rule of military steps commands), Scouts Pioneering (where 4 people have to work together to make a three-legged flagpole in under 15 minutes or so), and Contest of Wits (where 2 people had to participate in a quiz bowl against other groups). I participated in three of the competitions, which is Scouting Skill (as my main priority), Military Step Creation, and Dance.
My schedule since late-April was only to go to school at 6:30 AM, go to scouts practice until 5 or 6 PM and study in my tutoring place from 6:30 PM until 8 O’clock. Of course that’s only from Monday to Thursday because I don’t have a tutoring schedule on Friday and Saturday, but little by little I began to doubt my time-management ability, because I could only do my other hobbies such as playing bass guitar and drawing on Sundays, and maybe squeeze them in after Scouts practice on Fridays and Saturdays, but that’s about it.
I’m so close into going completely off the rails at that point, but I kept my cool most of the time, until a day before the scouts competition started. I, someone who has kept most of my feelings hidden in front of people including my family, cried in front of the whole scouts club. Of course, there’s only 9 people in my scouts club, we’re not a crowded bunch, but I cried during practice because I felt exhausted at that point, I didn’t know how else to react. That’s still going to be one of my top 5 embarrassing moments, but I’ve had worst. Thankfully, I’m not the type to bawl when I cry, I simply sob quietly, as I do most of the times. But at that moment, I questioned whether am I really built for this type of energy-consuming activity. I continued my crying session at home after practice that day, and ended up oversleeping the next day, resulting in me arriving late to practice, and other scouts member worried that I won’t be coming back to practice the next day. But, I’ve always been told that I am a disappointment by my parents because I always left anything I do halfway when I do it, and that’s why I will never master any type of skill in life. So, I made a vow to myself to never quit something I started halfway into doing it, or I could never start something new again.
The evening after that event is when the scouting skill competition took place. The scouting skills group were ready and focused, the first round is only the semaphore code and morse code skills test, and the code was given by the committee team. We were given a paper with 5x10 boxes on it, the rules is, the committee member will give 10 sets of codes with 5 letters on it, and the points will be determined with each letter that we got correct, so if we know the letter but we filled it in the wrong box, it will be marked wrong. That day, we felt good about our result, since we felt that we are one of the group who turned in our papers first, and the announcement arrived that night that we got into the final round as the 2nd group with the highest score in the competition.
The day after is when stuff gets real. The whole club arrived at school early in the morning with our dance uniform on, and it’s because we were chosen to fill that day’s morning activity ‘club showcase'. I am beyond nervous. It’s understandable, because as an introvert who barely talked to any of my own classmates, performing in front of the whole school, which in that day had a total of 800+ students, really brings out my stage fright. I kept saying to myself “Okay, I can do this. I know the whole routine, and I couldn’t mess anything up and embarrass myself in that stage.” With that in mind, we performed. I’m relieved that I didn’t make any mistakes during the routine. And I feel that performance cured my stage fright a bit. I’ve got nothing to be scared of. Because it’s not like I’m forced to construct a full speech right there at that stage. Performing felt good. But of course, it still came with an embarrassing feeling of thinking people will mark our club as “lame” if they don’t like our dance routine, and also having my classmates cheer for me in the crowd felt outright awkward as well. After the dance performance, I casually sent out my dispensation letter to class, changed into the full scouts attire, and practiced our Military Step routine. We finally got onto our ride, and arrived at the school where the competition’s being held. It finally felt official, we were in a scouts competition, we even got assigned a room to stay for the night, but I chose to rest at home because of some personal reasons. The first competition that day was the Contest of Wits. Since I didn’t participate in that competition, me and the others who also don’t chilled and relax for a bit at the room. Then, about 2 hours later, the quiz bowl team came back with the greatest news that our group got into the finals, which will be hosted in the evening at the same day. At about 2 PM, there are finally news that the Military Steps Creation competition will start, and we practiced in one of the fields before the competition, but when we finally called in, we made a lot of mistakes. It’s clear since the beginning that the Military Steps Creation competition won’t be our best trophy, but at that point we felt like we won’t be getting any trophy for it, not even 9th place. Two people cried that day, our Drill Commander, and the closest scouts member I had. I tried cheering her up, and told her that since she also participated in the Scouts Pioneering competition, that will be held after that, she could bottle up her current energy and release it during the next competition. We all tried to comfort each other that day, because each and every one in our Military Step Creation group made at least one mistake during the competition, and we were ready to accept the result of it later. After a brief of time, the Scouts Pioneering team were sent to the competition field and make their three-legged flagpole. Me and some other scouts member were resting in the room, and I almost fell asleep so we decided to go out and check out the Scouts Pioneering team. They’re doing great, bury the fact that the flag pole was a little crooked, it’s still neat work. And I’m happy to see the closest scout member to me smiling again. The mood was so bright, we even called the event photographer guy to take a picture of us. The Contest of Wits final round is on action after the Scouts Pioneering competition was finished. I didn’t know that you could see the competition’s on action at first, so me and one other scout member didn’t hang around and stayed in our room. But when the other scouts members are gone for a long period of time and nowhere to be seen, we checked out the room the quiz bawl was being held at and they’re inside. We felt betrayed that they didn’t tell us we could watch. Since the contest was already halfway in when we arrived, we couldn’t watch it in the same room, so we peeked through the window and found out that we got 3rd place. That’s the first definite trophy we had, and it felt so exciting! The Contest of Wits group weren’t happy with the result, but I’d say 3rd place is not bad for our first ever participating in a scouts competition. The next competition is the one I’ve been saving my energy up for. The Scouting Skill final round. This time, we had to operate and use our aiming compass skill. And the morse code and semaphore code round is even harder because one of the three person in our team had to do the signs instead of the committee. So, if the mistake is on signing, we wouldn’t even stand a chance. The compass round was fine, because right before that I practiced a lot and even memorized the main and addition wind directions that exists, which later turned out to be unnecessary because it’s not asked. We were given an aiming target and a place to put our feet on, so the result is the same to whoever aimed it. The morse code round is our worse nightmare, because when our team member was signaling the codes, we couldn’t hear a pause in between letters, that resulted in most of the answer sheet boxes being blank. We lost hope, but the semaphore round was a good payback, because we understood every letters being signed. That’s when the long day ended, I went home after the final round of the Scouting Skill competition.
The next day was a little bit more calmer, I would say, because the only competition left that day was Dance. I arrived at about 7 PM and we did our makeup, because the dance will look prettier if the dancers have makeup on, I guess. And the dance went pretty well, but not smoothly, I’d say, I made a total of 4 mistakes, and yes, I counted my mistakes for personal reasons. But looking back at the video of the dance routine, we were actually in sync, and it looked pretty good, so the trophy we got later is understandable. The long awaited trophy award announcement is right around the corner. We changed into our scouts uniform after the dance showcase and waited for each trophy announcement. The first trophy we got is the obvious one, which is the Contest of Wits, which we got as 3rd place. The next is the most confusing one, we got 5th place for Military Steps Creation, and after doubting ourselves so much, winning a trophy for it felt nice. Our Drill Commander actually screamed of confusion when that’s announced. That trophy made us confused in a good way. The next trophy also got us confused, but in a bad way. We got 6th place for Scouts Pioneering, which we expect to be higher ranked than the Military Steps Creation. But we didn’t let that get us down, because the next trophy was well-deserved, we got 5th place for the Dance competition. Our routine was nothing out of this world, and our attire is simple as it can be, but we were in sync and our mistakes isn’t as fatal as we exaggerated it to be, so we all agreed it's the trophy we deserved the most. After that, it hits the climax, because the last competition's trophy winner will be announced, and…we got 2nd place in Scouting Skill! The highest rank we've gotten, and it's amazing in our eyes because it's our first scouts competition ever, and all of these trophies just made us want to enter more. We were happy and all, but we got another unexpected trophy as 'favorite patrol’ and it even came with a medal, add those and the participation trophy, we got a total of 7 trophies and 1 medal. It's the greatest achievement ever. I'm so hyped up for our next competition, because we already decided to enter one in October, so these types of posts will be ready again in about 5-6 months!
That's the full summary of the three days full of blood, sweat, and tears. I'm not even exaggerating, I was on my period during all that, and we’re all sweaty all the time because of practice, and there’s at least one scout member who cried in one day during those three days. I hope it explained well of why I really had to take a break from posting weekly post that week. And see you all in next week’s post because summer break is right around the corner and I've got tons of things to write about! Goodbye.
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