Copa Fiesta: Are You Game?

went to help out as a "facilitator" for this festival organised by nvac called "copa fiesta". quite convenient cos it's held near jurong east mrt where there is a huge open ground, very near my house.

the job scope said "facilitator". but when i went for the briefing for this event on friday i gradually found out that it was actually an Amazing Race, and that facilitators = OGLs. in fact, we had to run with them all over the island.

the in-charge looked at me as i sat there, dazed and boring and said something about "hey facilitators need to be hyped and energetic as they must run all over the island. are u sure u wanna be a facilitator?"

growl. it's near 6pm and i'm just starting to get my daily sluggishness. who knows anyway?

ok so the next day armed with street directory and bus guide i went to report at 0930. got assigned to 4 secondary school (sec 2) gals from choa chu kang (cck) sec. names: Li Yi, Priscilla, Shuqin and Chin Yee.

ok firstly i tried to engage them in conversation, "test water". after all it was my first OGL experience and i didn't know what to do.. but luckily they were quite chatty cos they were good friends. saved me alot of work.

we went to 3 charitable organisations and 3 "pit stops" - AWWA Special school somewhere in AMK-Hougang (Lor Napiri), AMK Central, Singapore School for the Deaf (Mountbatten Road), Bugis, CARE Singapore (Pasir Ris), Changi Airport T2 then back to Jurong East, in that order. took us about 7 hours, way overshot the estimated time (4-5 hrs). haha

but anyway, we got fourth in place, not a bad result since the team that came in third wasn't far away. and the gals i had were really speed demons - running all the way once we came out of public transport. We ran and ran until, yes i had to admit, i had completely lost control of them. There was one time that two of them just dashed across Mountbatten Road, three lanes wide in the forward direction, to the central divider, then three lanes across to the other side of the road.

horrible. i was so damn freaked out, and a policeman stationed nearby (there was ndp preview at national stadium) looked at me with those eyes as if to say, "hey u in-charge of these kids?"

then there was that time where we hor-laned near kallang. we were supposed to take the bus 11 at kallang bus depot but was used for ndp chartered buses, so we decided to walk to SADeaf instead, since we can't find the next bus-stop that has 11, the place was kallang which had a darn sleazy outlook, and i dun want them to be running around the place too much.

so we walked, and across this field near a construction site near the junction of Geylang Lor 4 was this grass patch. we came out of the patch and found out that all our footwear had oval-shaped seeds stuck to it, which had needles protruding out of it like a porcupine. i got pierced by one of those and i think shuqin got it too, it was painful, there seem to have been some venom inside those needles. well, lesson learnt.

yup nice experience. as i said to the gals, winning is not important - they were seemingly hell-bent on winning, even by unscruplous means (like cutting queues), the journey is more important than whether you win or not. but they rebutted me cheekily. guess they have much to learn.

and may i present the gals:

chinyee ("chilli")- the chatterbox of the team, voice is one notch above the rest, hellbent on winning
shuqin ("sq006")- sportswoman and often leader when on "run" mode (guess who's the last man)
li qi - "pri 4" gal due to her petite frame, sometimes lagging when on "run" mode. always snacking, all of them. likes to read books, even on amazing race.
priscilla - not your runner, always lagging on "run" mode. likes to seat on mrt seats with one of the other gals sitting on top of her knees.

ha. sometimes i feel like the guy in powerpuff gals - the "Professor" whos surrounded by 4 zesty gals who zip everywhere. maybe not save the world. ha.

was fun leading them around, hope to have more fun in FOW.