On Monday 20 January we had our second hike. The theme of today was team building, so we were just staying near to the university. I thought I was prepared, I had my sunglasses and rain trousers, but I forgot my knife…

We were random divided into teams, Norwegians and internationals together. The first competition was about making a tarp with a fire place and places to sit down. We were with 8 people in a group. I had never set up a place like that before, or maybe once when I was on survival week at secondary school. But I didn’t remember how to do it. In our group we divided some tasks to get everyone working. So, with Nathalie I was in charge of making the fireplace. We collected some stones and put it in a half circle. Because, somebody told us to do it that way so, the heat gets reflected to the tarp and there will be more warmth, I didn’t know that before!

They used logs at the back of the tarp, a clever way to make the tarp. Some rope was knotted around trees and I need to get my know how about knotting back. But maybe we’ll learn it later in one of our classes? When we were finished, we saw the other tarps and rate them with a grade and gave feedback. At first, the rating criteria was not very clear to me. But it became clear that it had to be waterproof, big enough for the group, windproof and the fireplace in a good place so that everyone’s got warm. I’ve seen three different tarps and each got his own quality. We gave feedback on each other tarps and then got time for some improvement.

Our fireplace needed to be wider, so everyone’s got warm and me had made better walls. After the next feedback round, there was only one problem with ours. What if it started raining, the back of the tarp would be filled with water…and that’s kind of a big problem. That’s one thing to keep in mind when building a tarp again.

After making our own places, we started a fire and had some lunch. Then we got one more game, we stayed in the same group. But I think that it would have been good to switch groups, so you get to know other students and learn how to work with them together. The game was to build a tower as high as possible from stuff in your backpacks. We tried to wrap our backpacks together in the tarp, but it wasn’t stable and fell.

I’ve seen that it’s very important that all the group members do something, even if it’s small, it’s something the group needs!