I have been to the depths of the Swedish wilderness and back! Last Thursday I took a train about an hour and then boarded a bus and started my two day journey to Sweden’s National 4-H Camp, which was held in Jämtland. Don’t worry I remembered all my bags this time! The bus ride wasn’t anything too exciting we would stop and pick people up along the way and I mainly just slept and listened to my iPod. We spent the night at their equivalent to our high school that was for students interested in agriculture. So we went down and looked at the animals and their robotic dairy (which are very very popular here). We left the next morning at 5:30 and arrived at camp around 2:00.
Northern Sweden has a lot of trees and mosquitoes!! I have never seen mosquitoes so thick, you literally had to wave them out of your face to see. I was also a bit surprised when we pulled up to just see a big field on the side of the road where people were starting to put up tents. A bit different from Rock Springs. All four of us IFYEs stayed with the Young Farmers group. They were from Great Britain (England and Wales) and they send a group to the Swedish 4-H camp every year. They had two group leaders that were a couple years older than me but all the kids were between 13 and 18. So there were 13 girls in one tent and 8 boys in another. The first day was just setting up and getting settled. They also had an opening ceremony, but it was in Swedish so I was a bit lost during it but each county had a theme that they used to decorate their camp sight and then had a t-shirt or some kind of uniform. They got points for everything and there was a lot of motivation to win. That night they had a dance, they are all very good swing dancers and do a lot of fun group dances.
The next morning we woke up to rain and cold. We just had free time in the morning and then in the afternoon they put us into groups and we played fun little get to know you games. One game was ”throw the moose foot” which, by the way, I wasn’t very good at, I accidentally threw it into a group of people. Most of the Swedish campers seems scared to use their English so not very many of them really talked to us for the first couple days of camp. They also forgot to put the IFYEs on any of the activity lists. So that combined with the rain and cold made the start of camp kind of difficult. That night we played Moose Burn Ball, which was the same game I played with my first host family on Midsummers only they added a moose element. Instead of a bat we used moose antlers or a moose leg. The numbers worked out to play the Internationals vs Sweden, Sweden won, but it was still fun! After the game everyone built camp fires and one of the groups played music. We did some of their big group dances and then they organized a mini field hockey tournament, 2 v 2. My partner and I won our first game and lost in the second round.
The next morning, Sunday, the weather was much nicer. We played some more games with the same groups from the day before. That was in the morning and then we had free time in the afternoon so we walked to the village that was about a 15 minute walk away. We just went to the store and got some snacks. That night we went on a night hike. It never got completely dark so we started our 5 mile journey at 7 and got done around 1:00 A.M. it was actually a lot of fun though. They put us in teams of 4 and we had to complete tasks and answer questions along the way. The tasks were things like canoeing across a lake, identifying animal skeletons, and other team building type activities. My group also took a wrong turn and ended up walking about 2 miles out of our way, but they were all nice and did a good job translating the questions and speaking English for me. It was rainy all through the walk but we kind of liked it when it rained because it helped with the mosquitoes.
The camp is in a different location every year. So every year they play a game that has something to do with the location, this game is kept top secret until it’s time to play. This year, because northern Sweden is so cold and gets so much snow in the winter, they had a dump truck full of snow brought in and we had a snowball relay. The IFYEs and Young Farmers didn’t do very well in this but we tried. The British didn’t seem to really be into sports or very competitive. They kept teasing me and always referred to me as “The American” but it was all in good fun and I enjoyed getting to know them and learning about their Young Farmers organization, which is the closest thing they have to 4-H in Britain. In the afternoon they had a talent show, which the Young Farmers had big ideas for but not really any plans or organization. At this point (about 3 hours before the show) I couldn’t take it any longer and took over the organization of their talent. I had them do the “It’s Contagious” skit and then because you got points for crowd interaction I helped them do the Blue Jay call-back song. I was really impressed on how well they did, they all got really into it! Lots of people commented that it was one of the better Young Farmers performances they had seen. They placed 4th out of 13, which was really the only thing we did well in. It was one of the only nice warm days we had so it was good day! That night we had ice cream to celebrate 50 years of 4-H in Sweden and it was followed by a dance with a live band. I had a lot of fun learning their dances, and like I said they are all very good at swing dancing so I really liked that!
