SJAB March Camp — Part 1

SJI-SJAB Secondary 3 March Leadership Camp.

Mr. Lim (or someone else, I forgot who) said: “Just call it March Camp for short!”

We, the SJAB members, couldn’t go home during this term break because of this March Camp.

Okay, so it was said that this March Camp was run in order to prepare us, the Secondary 3 cadets, to become NCOs (Non-commissioned Officer if I was not mistaken). Local students had been in this CCA for 2 years (Sec 1 and Sec 2) and this was their third year so they were much more trained than us, but we the scholars were treated the same way as them regardless of the fact that we were new students. Wow, scholars surely got so many expectations.

Okay. Now I better go straight to the camp part.

Day 1: March 16th, 2009

I couldn’t wake up using my holiday’s wake up schedule (a.k.a 9-10 AM) because we had to report to school at 7.30. So I woke up as usual and reported to school as usual.

Our first program was going into bunks and then…

Foot drill (Indonesia: PBB)

Since we were quite a newbie here (we had only gone through the foot drill 3x, compared to locals who had been going through this for 2 years!), we were trained very intensively in this foot drill. We had covered most of the basic and more advanced foot drill, but still, some were left untaught.

Then we went to the next program which was the Camp intro presentation and then…

MOI (Methods of Instruction) presentation.

This presentation’s purpose was to teach us the most effective and efficient way of giving instructions, so when we became NCOs, we could teach the cadets well. Then we went to the NCO presentation.

We were introduced about the Post holders in NCO-ship (some kind of EXCO in Prefects). There were about 7 of them:

1. CSM — Company Sergeant Major — leader of the leaders. responsible for everything.
2. ACSM — Assistant CSM
3. Treasurer — there are 2
4. R&P — Research and Publicity — responsible for introducing this SJAB to new students and conducting research on number of cadets, number of first aid kit needed for a public duty, etc.
5. R&W — Recreation and Welfare — making sure that the cadets get enough recreation and are not abused
6. QM — Quarter Master — responsible for the Quarter
7. PD — Public Duty — managing the Public Duty the SJAB members had to attend
8. TNCO — Training NCO — planning the schedule for every week

And we were asked to plan from now what position we wanted. Me? I went for TNCO and R&W because I thought they were the most compatible for me.

At night our program was…

Watching 300

I hadn’t watched it yet, so this was a new thing for me.

Then the day ended with night reflection and sleeping time. We slept at about 22.30 PM and we had to fall in at 4.30 AM (gosh! only 6 hours of sleep or even less)