Personal Narrative-Water Experience

The most prominent time that I had to call upon my internal character is when I was asked to help with a group of kids from Mexico city that came up to Duluth for a month. During this time I was asked join the group on a weeklong trip to the boundary waters. The week before this trip I was at a camp called Positive Energy, it is a summer camp, during this week we went canoeing and rock climbing. The group from Mexico had never done anything like that so the camp leader asked me to help them learn the basic skills like paddle strokes and how to belay for climbing. After the week was up I was approached by the leader and asked if I would join them in the following week trip to the boundary waters as an assistant counselor, I couldn't say no. our first few night we spent camping and exploring the beautiful northern Minnesota. These kids had never even set up a tent before this, so me and the other American person I was with helped them learn how to set up a tent, start a fire and filter water.
I showed a lot of perseverance
and patients when teaching these things, most of the skill needed for camping off the grid we had to teach with a language barrier. With there being the language barrier things we were saying didn’t always some across we hoped. When our week in the boundary waters was coming to an end we made a day trip canoeing. Again because of the different languages giving commands for turning and paddling rules was hard but then by the end of the day we were able to understand each other after some work. I understood some Spanish and they understood English fairly well so we created a mix of both languages to communicate effectively.
Language was a difficult problem that didn’t always provide its self with an easy answer.
I had taken Spanish during my previous schooling and because of this I was able to be more of a help with the kids from Mexico. As I was able to understand what they were saying when they forgot a word in English. It helped create more of a relationship with them than if I didn’t, I was able to help them understand what was going on when our leader was talking too fast for them to understand.
While they were up here for a month is was also a learning experience, I was able to learn about a different culture from a direct source and learn about their thought and feeling about the wonderful place that we live. From hearing them talk about the differences from northern Minnesota and Mexico City I learned how lucky I am to live where I do for example they kept talking about how the water tastes here and how lucky we are to have the trees and air quality we
do.