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Hie Everyone - hopefully we have all enjoyed our summer holidays!
Personally, I have spent my vacation mostly in Montenegro at the beach :) which was undeniably a wonderful way to spend the summer.
However i also found a way to integrate CAS into the blissful days at the seaside!
Luckily for me, it didn't even involve me missing the sunshine or the water, rather i was making sure that everyone has the good time they planned to. I signed up for the 'watchmen' :) of the beach; the people who monitor that visitors do not swim beyond certain points (there is a lot of water traffic there and frequently there have been accidents)and that the children, especially the really small ones, follow the beach's code of conduct. I certainly gained more skills , it made me observant watching loads of children running and making sure they dont fall in the water does that to you ! I created a sort of system between ourselves ("watchmen") so all of us got regular breaks and each had only 2 shifts per day maximum. In the evenings I also helped arrange the beach-chairs so the next morning the beach would be tidy for the next set of visitors -
Also we had a color coded warning system which we were required to initiate if the weather or other factors didn't permit swimming. There are three colored flags signified green-its fine to swim yellow - caution required red - no swimming allowed - so on days when the red flag was up we had to make sure that no one swam out. I had to use the red flag only once because there was a storm coming out which turned out to be pretty bad , loads of lightening but everyone was off the beach well before that! But it made me realize that although a small storm like this is not likely to cause major destruction organisation and enough warning time is crucial to get people to safety - on a global perspective such disasters as hurricane Katrina had devastating consequences due to a lack of planning and hopefully we will never see a repeat of that again.
Thankfully, on my watch i didn't get any trouble :)except for once when a kid cried for hours when his inflatable mattress was blown away and he was angry that i wouldn't swim up to the horizon line to get it. (In my defense, it was really, far away!)
Overall, it was really fun since i got to to work in a great team and it was nice to have something to look forward to each day!
Lastly, another CAS event was a children's fair where i organised little car races. We had organised little race track for the children and had made several prizes for 1 to 3rd places. The winners seemed to be exceptionally pleased with themeselves so hopefully everyone enjoyed themselves! Taking apart the race track was a tiring job but I finished up relatively quickly so I managed to catch a glimpse at the otehr activities going on.
I also participated in the judging of the sand castle competition which had really made my day! I had collaborated with other people on my "watchmen" team and we gave out the final prizes for the day!
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