5 February 2014, Wednesday

Today was our last meeting before the actual retreat. We had a lot of things to discuss and finalize. The most important thing was studying the schedule and our respective jobs. I was assigned to be in bus number 1 along with Patrick, Jonathan and Tiffany, with the supervisor Ms. Maria. We also finalized the attendance list and where students will be assigned to. We also discussed regarding the daily activities and what we would be doing during the sessions, and also the amazing race clarifications and preparations. There were a lot of things i learned today. First, was that having a large number of students, organization and most importantly, familiarity of the students is important. This is because you will be taking care of them and taking full responsibility for them while they are under your care. Knowing where you will be at all times and where the students will be at is important because you want to make sure that you are staying according to schedule and following the rules of the retreat. The second thing i learned was that being a part of this means you need to always be prepared for things before hand. I am usually lacking in preparations so now i know i need to work on that. For example, buses should have plastic bags for trash and tags so that we would know where to go. We were also given night patrol and jobs to wake up earlier than the others. The third thing i learned was that being the host of the event, you must always keep yourself working to ensure that all work is met. We had to decide on who takes the night patrol and where. This, we had done together smoothly, as we would be doing our patrol wherever our respective rooms will be. We also had a last minute explanation and finalization of the amazing race: place, ribbon colors, grouping, instruction, sequence, rules and clues. After everything was settled, we just had to wait for the actual date.