Three cheers for Camp Royaneh
It is our greatest endeavor
Its name, its victories, its fame
Will be known from coast to coast (coast to coast!)
You can search anyplace, anywhere
But no other camp can compare with
Our own dear Camp Royaneh
With all our scouts and all our shouts
We have a standard
HEY!
"Royaneh was an amazing experience and was so fun. We learnt so many new skills and mainly communication. If communication wasn’t clear everybody got confused and nobody knew what to do By the end of it we all learnt to work together and be a team!" -Mahi
The Scout Camp, Royaneh, was distinct in many ways. Some (like the competitiveness) made the camp very enjoyable and others (like the unfortunate bathroom situations) made us appreciate the privileges waiting for us at home. Every single bit of the experience was incredible.
Since this was a journey we’ll never forget, we’ll start narrating from the very beginning, known as “the very best place to start”. And no, I wasn’t kidding about the start: the car drive there! The drive to Camp was super loud because of the excitement, anxiety, and k-pop. When we got to the campsite, we took half an hour to sort ourselves into cabins which had open spaces for windows and doors. (Sadly, the open spaces allowed animals and cold wind to come in during the week.) On the first day (Sunday), we took our swim test and went on a tour around camp. We also had our first dinner which we anticipated to be gross but turned out to be ok (not great, but ok). And we stayed up very late playing cards and chatting. It was almost like seeing "the day bleed into nightfall".
On the second day, we had our classes for the first time, and it served as an introduction to what the rest of the week would be like. We met many new people, and some of them were in many of our classes, such as this one guy we met named Ariansh and got renamed to Are-you-ranch by the end of camp. The third day was very similar to the second, but with a few more clues of which directions we were going in. We also had troop campfires in the night. During the first troop campfire at camp Royaneh we invited the staff members Ally and Meghan to show support and appreciation. Both of them had fascinating stories about being a girl in ‘boy scouts’, facing discrimination, and hair. It was a really powerful time as we discussed topics that people usually shy away from. During the second campfire, Tanvi's brother Tarun and three other staff members had come to talk. We had pizza and listened to ghost stories. A troop 123 scout, Kylie, says her takeaway from them was that "Everyone has their own personality which makes everyone unique".
On the fourth day, Wednesday, there were gladiators that served as an opportunity to publicize our confidence while losing to all the other troops at Royaneh, including troop 287, the most popular troop and the troop that had been at Royaneh longest. They served as our role models, enemies, and allies across the course of the week. In the gladiators, we had to (or at least attempt to) run fast, aim well, balance, and remember. There was also a lot of synergizing, which really helped us get to know each other better. All patrols did better than others in different games. At the end of the day, we were never told which patrol won. That's alright though, because we all put in effort and had a lot of fun. One of the scouts, Saanvi, describes her experience as she watched us compete: “I remember standing outside the relay race arena cheering my friends on. One patrol v.s. the other. Me holding all of the glasses and jackets. Losing my voice. That was a great day. I could see the perspiration on not only their, but everyone’s faces. It was obviously a fun game, but everyone was still competitive. It was one of the best evenings of summer camp.”
And for those of us who took the Wilderness Survival merit badge, that was the day we had to spend a night in the woods. It was a very sleepless night for most of us; Mahi made the record of a maximum of 4 hours of sleep that night and I made the minimum record of none. It was fun building the shelter, but life definitely became a lot harder when it came to sleeping in it. There were two main shelters of people sleeping together from our troop, though originally there were three; Me/Adhuna, Jisha/Olivia/Siyona, and Laya/Saanvi/Ritisha/Sahana/Jules/etc... in one shelter. But when we got there to sleep, we hadn’t completed our shelter through some last-minute changes so Jisha's group helped move our shelter next to theirs to create warmth through body heat. They also brought many more branches, making our shelter much more insulated, and I really want to thank them for that. We tried to rest, but after some time, we decided to wait and chat until 5:00 am, when we would be allowed to excuse ourselves from the woods aka deathtrap.
On Thursday the wilderness survival participants were super tired during their classes for the day, but it was eventually over. We knew what to expect by then, so we were prepared and managed our merit badge classes and/or ranks. And the skit night was amazing to watch and act out and our troop thinks that we did pretty well. Everyone was so nervous but the final result was flawless. The other troops also had entertaining skits about true-life stories, train crashes, and we did a skit about a foot cream commercial. There were 2 co-directors played by Sabya and Haasini, the assistant director played by Sahana, and all of our actors auditioning for this foot commercial. Ritisha was the monotonous character, Mahika was the nervous character, Adhuna played the athlete, Saanvi was the singer, and Suhani and Ruhi played the celebrities with Supriya as their personal assistant. The skit was around 2-3 minutes long and the script was simple. The actors were told to add personal touches to it to make it more exaggerated and entertaining, which it definitely was.
Here's a personal experience of the athlete, Adhuna: "I feel like personally backstage everyone was kind of stressing and trying to adjust their lines a bit. I was asking what I should do before I take off my shoe but Sabya and Haasini were like you don't have to do anything. And when it was time to go on everything went out the window because everyone performed really well. And that walk on stage was very spontaneous, I don't even know why I did that to be fair."
By Friday, most of us had grown a fondness for the camp and were sad to be leaving, though some of us were homesick as well. The closing night skits ended a lot less enthusiastically than the other skit nights, so the staff members must have been sad to depart as well. We packed most of our bags for Saturday, on which we left our "Dear camp Royaneh". Seeing our parents after a week made a lot of us very happy and expressive about our week without them. In the car that I was in, Ritisha, Tanvi R, and I talked nonstop for 10 minutes before instantly passing out for about 30 minutes nonstop (the dads had photographic proof of our sleep which they shared with the other dads as well). This experience was very thrilling and has made me more grateful, tough, and better connected to my "irreplaceable" troop. I will never forget the first time I saw two rattlesnakes in the forest and stayed a week without my parents. It has made me understand and learn a lot, become more competitive, and better control myself. I know that I will go to many other scouting camps and I'm very excited about them, but as Tanvi R had passionately stated during the drive home and I had most passionately agreed, "Royaneh will always have a special place in my heart, as it was the first scouting camp I ever went to and the first scouting community of such size I had truly felt part of.”
Credits: Aadya, Sabya, Suhani, Kylie, Josthitha, Ruhi, Haasini, Saanvi, Adhuna, Anya, Tanvi R, Jisha, Ritisha, Tanvi A, Mahi
We're troop 123!
We're the queen bees!
Irreplaceable, insatiable
Voices running free!
Remember our name!
We're troop 123!
I want to include a special thanks to Sabya for constantly re-checking this article and putting so much effort into refining this piece of work. I also want to thank Ruhi, Haasini, Anya, and Tanvi A for examining every detail of this work together and adding a lot more.
Summer camp pictures link shared by Camp Royaneh:
Link to the pictures Aruna Auntie took:
Thanks Adhuna!
Amazing Job Aadya!