Okkie Jooste: The best and worst couple of days of my university life.

On a cold and rainy Monday morning, sacrificing our week break from campus, my fellow Life Science classmates and I jump on a bus and make our way to the Okkie Jooste Nature Reserve in Stellenbosch. As soon as we got there we unloaded our bags from the bus, chose our rooms and headed back to the hall for our first talk of the camp. Sharing a room with seven other females was going to be a new experience for me, barely having space to change your mind in the dorm rooms. Not only was our rooms packed with eight females, but also with the bags of eight females! One of our bathrooms' geysers was not working and we woke up at 4am to take a warm shower. This limited our sleeping time and this affected concentration levels and also our ability to do the work that needed to be done. The next day was hike day, so burning calves, aching legs and complaints were all over the place, because it felt like we were climbing a mountain. As we made our way back to the rooms, we discovered some stuff 'missing' and declared that there was a "teaspoon thief" in the room as a teaspoon was the first thing that was missing.

Next to the hiking, breakfast duty was the toughest challenge for me as I am NOT a morning person. The red team killed breakfast duty, but failed to do so at supper duty as two members of our group failed to rinse the chicken correctly. This caused chaos in the kitchen and after correcting our mistake the red team was good to go. The last morning of our camp the girls discovered that there was warm water i the bathroom AT ALL! Since no one wanted to get out of their hot and cozy bed and jump into a cold shower, many girls did not wash on the last day. Nevertheless, the couple of days spent at Okkie Jooste was not that bad, after all, it was a CAMP.

                                          Figure 1: The Inside of our dorms.

                                          Figure 2: Okkie Jooste dorms.