GBT Winter Camp 2007 - an incredible experience
by Katharina Fricke
You want to know what it feels like to be a real star? You want to experience the flurry of camera flashes? You dream of being asked for an autograph wherever you are? You want to be part of hundreds of family photo albums? Participate in the next GBT winter camp - all your dreams will come true.
Before we started our journey to Baikal, a short message from Alyona, our project manager at North Baikal, informed us about a small change in the programme saying that we would take part in a school meeting during the first days to promote the idea of volunteering. Really curious about meeting "some local kids", living in host families and the Siberian winter, we arrived in Irkutsk, where we met some more participants and our crew leader and interpreter, namely Sasha and Anya. After a long and funny train trip we arrived in Severobaikalsk and in the arms of our friendly host families who were in an eager competition of serving the best food to their own guest. Nevertheless we had to leave them very quickly again because of the annual North Baikal Region meeting at the School for Active Tourism.
It is still hard to find words for this - imagine a school, a little noisy, it smells like chalk from the blackboards, toilets are smaller than normal. Sounds usual? In each class room the floor is covered with sleeping pads and sleeping bags, with blankets and pillows, on the small tables tea pots and enormous amounts of cookies - and the "few" kids turned out to be 126.
The next two days were filled with activities from simulating a press conference to doing some volunteer work outside, from introducing the idea of volunteering to common morning exercises at the gym, from hand-painted posters to PowerPoint presentations, from stories in the evening to joint singing, from being photographed to taking pictures of kids asking for autographs. And this was just the starting event of our amazing winter camp.
It continues with a hiking trip on the "Path to Boguchan", that was completely covered with snow high up to the knees, so we walked several kilometres on frozen Lake Baikal. Imagine a row of ten international volunteers, three GBT people, four STEO kids and one teacher, a dog from Baikalskoe village and an ambitious photographer on skies walking in a row like geese, stumping through the crusted snow, below at least one meter of ice. An amazing landscape, forests on the shore, weird ice formations near the shoreline, a blurred view on the far mountain ranges on the other side of Lake Baikal, no wind, bright sunshine forcing everybody to wear sun glasses - its incredible warm in spring Siberia. After 18 kilometres, we arrived at least at the touristical base "Ekho", where warm tea and a wonderful dinner was waiting for us. A wonderful day out, that continued with making first drafts in small discussion groups about the work for the next days. Some old information boards had to be restored and redesigned, some new ones will be put up during summer time and there was no hiking map explaining the traveller the nature and hidden points of attraction on his way. But that was not all - an eager man already started with building a snow town on one of the near Sludyanski Lakes and needed some help. Armed with saws, warm clothes and sunscreen we joined him, building a toboggan run for the kids flanked by two snow walls and some sorts of igloos. Of course all these things needed to be tested (just for safety purposes) and so we spent an afternoon sledging and hiding behind the igloo walls in upcoming snowball fights. The evening continued with a secret GBT initiation ritual at the campfire after passing a kind of steeplechase in two teams and a talent show, where each participant performed one of his hidden abilities - from singing to juggling, from doing cartwheels to throwing coins with the help of the belly button, from traditional kids games to spontaneous theatre improvisations.
Back in Severobaikalsk, we really started working on the information boards and the hiking leaflet which we finished at least in two languages with a black-and-white map of the trail, a description of the path and its points of attraction and some background information about flora, fauna, Lake Baikal in general and a short historical overview about the surrounding area. Others worked on the wooden information boards and transferred an artistic technique of printing to designing information boards with the help of a computer programme and so managed to finish three boards that will be put up along the trail by the STEO kids this summer. All the time some of the kids dropped in to see what we were doing and often started helping us, practising their language skills and supporting us in working on the boards. Often our work was interrupted by short visits to local museums and information centres, a meeting with an orthodox priest in the church - and was crowned by a real press conference informing local people about the work we did in cooperation with GBT and STEO.
As one could not spent the evenings outside at the campfire, we had an amazing programme of events and activities, from a Siberian Food Party to Banya with outside temperatures of -32°C, from an International Cuisine Party to Sauna, and at least some not really calmer evenings with our host families, talking and smattering and laughing in Siberian kitchens, looking at family photos and going to bed always late in the night.
And suddenly, these ten much too short days of work and fun, of snow outside and heat inside were over. We saw amazing landscapes, visited hot springs, worked a lot with kids, learned new Russian words, discovered Siberian culture and I dare to say that we all made new friends - by the way: today I got a first hand-written letter from an eleven years old kid from Severobaikalsk.
Written by Katharina Fricke, participant of the winter project 2007 and member of Baikalplan Association, Germany.
