Monday, 20.02.17 trip 4 – international friluftsliv student organized navigation and orienteering Jegersberg

This Monday was the first trip organized by the international students. Unfortunately, no Norwegians showed up, because they had holidays, what we didn’t know.

The topic of the day was orienteering and navigation in Jegersberg. To make the groups we played a game, where everybody got a paper with an animal on it. When the game starts, everybody has to make the sound of their animal and find the other group members. Because we were so little people we were just groups of two. The organization team decided to put groups together and started than to explain what we have to do. Max and I started to read the map and we kind of shared the role of the leader in the group. The problem was, that no one of us knew where we are on the map and we couldn’t find something. First, we were walking with another group but we didn’t agree with the decisions they made. We decided as a group to go our own way and tried to find the last numbers on the map. We had a lot of moments, where we were standing together as a group and discussing what to do. All of us took sometimes the map and tried to guess where we are and where we have to go. In the end, Max and me were the persons who decided. At the beginning, we were motivated and thought it was a good idea to go another way. We all searched for the bags and we found two. But after a time, we didn’t know where we are again and lost more and more our motivation. We had to motivate each other and tried to stay positive. After a little more than an hour Max was the only one who was motivated enough to search for the bags. We started to get tired and hungry and we didn’t have something with us. We said that we will search on that place for some more minutes and go back then. In this time, we got a text, that we should go back to the lake. When we arrived at the lake we were glad, that we were not the only group who couldn’t find something. But we were the last group who gave up, what made us happy and feel proud. We had a good group cohesion and were able to discuss and solve problems. I would say this Monday trip was good to experience a situation where you feel lost as a group and have to find a solution together for the problem. We didn’t really practice map reading and orientation, because we had no clue where we are and the environment we saw in real and what we saw on the map was totally different. In addition to that I learned to have always something to eat somewhere in my pockets, because it is hard to think clear while being so hungry.