Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award
What. A. Rollercoaster. Just a day ago I went through my two-day Duke of Edinburgh’s Bronze Award expedition, and just 4 days ago, went through a two-day practice expedition. I cannot quite pin down exactly how I feel, sad, relieved, absolutely exhausted… All of the above, and more. I would like to take this opportunity to share my experience, the reflections I’ve gone through in my mind, and any advice for anyone reading that is thinking about doing DofE. I’m going to share pictures and videos, baring in mind this is only my opinions and my own experience. Enjoy.
Context
For those who are not familiar, Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is a youth programme that allows teens to explore their interests and develop them that is assessed according to the following categories: Skills, physical recreation, volunteer and expedition. You will have to carry out each activity for at least 3 months and one of the activities for 6, at the end, a qualified assessor of the specified category will need to reflect on your progress and write about it. However, the only anomaly of such requirement is the expedition category, where for me, I was required to hike 2 days in a row, camping over for 1 night for the DofE Bronze Award.
When DofE was first introduced, I hadn't even taken a good look at the introduction before I threw it in the back of my mind, rejecting it. Walking + extra work + leaving my soft pillow to sleep on the cold hard ground = disaster in the making. However, more and more of my friends started to pay attention to it and encouraging me to sign up, at the time, I thought to myself: It wouldn’t be that bad, right? I’d just fill in a form and by the next month or so I’d be able to brag about this ‘award’ that I did. Oh, I could not be more wrong. I found myself motivating myself, reflecting, reaching out to teachers to seek opportunities to fulfil my requirements, dealing and working around rejections.
Charity
To be 100% transparent, this is probably the category I had the greatest expectations for, and unfortunately expectations that were not met for reasons I’m about to discuss. In the beginning, I didn’t have any charity work going on for me, unless, those few 5-minute sessions shouting at my friends about some maths question counted. No extreme passion for saving the environment, no dedicated love for animals, the only thing I could remotely squeeze out of my head was that I enjoyed communicating/joking with people, young people, specifically. Then, I brainstormed even more, considering what else do I like and would like to do more of… Bingo. Badminton. What if I had arranged a session for me to play more sports with younger years of my school whilst being able to get onto the courts and play what I love? I had the idea, had contacted the head of sports of my school to try to work out a badminton session but was unfortunately rejected due to such an opportunity already being available, then I suggested that I could take on a leadership role within the current horizon program offered by my school. This way, one, it meant less work for teachers who would be spending lots of time maintaining control over 30 kids and setting up nets if no one was there to help and two, an opportunity for me to lead. Luckily, my head of sports teacher was keen, and I invited 2 of my good friends along to help, because the more, the merrier, right?
Initially, all of this sounded idealistic for me, and it was my first real chance of being a leader, but like many things, it was not as smooth as it seemed to be. From the very first lesson, the teacher in charge never gave us a plan or discussed with us about possible coaching with the students who were between Year 6 to Year 8, this led to all the sessions being completely hands-off, chaotic and the most we were able to do was maintain the safety of the kids a bit better. At that time, I thought it was best as it stayed as messy as it was because it would be a real shame for me to stop 4 kids who’s swinging their rackets around to teach them, I wouldn’t have wanted that for me, so I wouldn’t want to force that onto others, leaving me with days when I would just play with my friends. Reflecting back, there was a lot more that I could have done including the fact that there were a lack of communication on both sides of my teacher and I which I could have initiated, to have an authoritative role to help us teach the kids. I can’t exactly pinpoint why I hadn’t talked to my teacher about organizing a better session, but if I had to say, I would say it’s out of laziness… Even if it’s hard to accept. I feel that I did the absolute minimum to pass this category of DofE which have left me feeling no sense of accomplishment whatsoever.
Sports
I won’t dive deep into my sports category because it’s the one category I’m most comfortable with as I do sports almost daily, whether that’d be doing some weights in the gym or playing badminton 2 to 3 times a week. What I will say though, is that when I see a lot of people in my year group extremely stressed out and me, a so-called workaholic, who doesn’t feel discontent or burnt out (just yet), a big part of that is due to my rigorous sports schedule. I do sports to not only stay in health, get in shape, but also allow myself to treat them as breaks in-between studies. DofE was just another reassurance to do more of what I love doing.
Skills - Cooking
At the start of the term, I signed up for the Chinese Cooking SCA that was available to us, with the goal of simply making some good food with some good people whilst casually checking the skills’ category off the DofE requirements. Now, since the beginning, I’ve never claimed to be good at cooking because all I really did was help my mom around the kitchen like cutting the ingredients or seasoning the food, but I really enjoyed those 15-20 minutes with her, getting to taste what her and I made together or just any kinds of cuisines was right up my alley. I know everyone says they’re a foodie, but I’m a foodie. I just hoped to take the SCA as an opportunity to move away from my comfort zone of my own kitchen and more just working with the limited options that school offers and see what I can make of it (and whether it tastes good, of course!)
I’m glad to say that… this SCA though with its own difficulties like power outages at school, so we couldn’t cook on some days, I look back fondly of the SCA because of the company that I was with, but also I’m really proud of the food I winged 90% of the time, for example, Coca-Cola chicken wings (可乐鸡翅）, dumplings （饺子）and hotpot（火锅）with homemade dipping sauce. Subsequently, I was very happy with the SCA, especially seeing my friends happily enjoying what I’ve made, and it’s true, whatever you made yourself tastes 10 times better. In the future, I know I’ll be doing lots more cooking in my free time, trying different home-cooked foods to use when I’m older.
Expedition
Though this part of the award was the shortest (consisting of 2 days of the practice expedition and 2 days of the assessed expedition), it was arguably the most impactful, testing my physical and mental limits, which I now realize were much farther than I’d thought. Daily, we were required to hike for at least 6 hours, and it came down to about 15-20 km per route taken. For the hikers and long-distance athletes, I’d assume that this would be a piece of cake, but for someone that has barely ever done long distance walks, let alone carrying a 60L bag and climbing up a mountain using all 4 limbs. I was behaving and thinking like the typical teenager, the instant anticipatory rise, knowing that I’m separated from my electronics and my soft-as-a-cloud bed.
Day 1:
With a million different worries in the back of my mind, I set off feeling already exhausted after 30 seconds of carrying my bag with absolutely no clue of how a compass works. Shout out to my teacher, who we sort of peer pressured into giving us all kinds of clues as to where to go when we got stuck in-between junctions, though our first day was made a lot better with his guidance, I knew that on the assessed expedition it would not be as smooth, so I made it my secret mission to learn how to use a map and a compass. With that being said, even with all the help, the large amount of stairs and seemingly short distances on the map which turned out to be never-ending paths. We had no idea what to expect which led to a hard reality check as our teacher broke the news that we were halfway through checkpoint 1 when we’d walked for more than an hour, convincing ourselves that we were almost at checkpoint 4 (which turned out to take another 4 hours of walking to reach).
Throughout the walk, I kept doubting myself, “why are there so many stairs?”, “we’re only HALFWAY to the checkpoint?”, I tried to get rid of those thoughts but so far, they kept coming back, and the irritation turned into frustration, “why did I sign up for this”, “how could the school let us walk these dangerous roads?”, eventually evolving into hopelessness, “we have 3 more routes after this, there’s no way I’m able to pull through”. As they say, no matter what happens, the sun still sets, and we still make it back to school (where we’d stay the night) despite the introduction of scratches and scars cut by the plants as we slid off the mountain. I was prepared to fall because of my horrible balance and wrong choice of shoes, but when I did, my heart dropped and all kinds of intrusive thoughts destroyed any kind of confidence I had. I found it fascinating that some people are more experienced and genuinely found those challenging bits of the route fun, while I kept worrying about falling off the cliff. After day 1, I noted to self that I had to get better shoes and work out how that little compass thing worked.
Day 2:
Looking back, I am very grateful for day 2 in which we took the longest and probably the easiest route out of the 4 that we had to take, this was the last day before the assessed expedition, and it allowed me to re-adjust my mindset and learn to use a compass. I will admit, we were taught how to use a map and compass to get our ways around, but it was completely different using it in a classroom and in the middle of a mountain (and I forgot what I learned), along with my teacher’s hints, I followed the tiny twist and turns on the map and magnified it, imagining the curves on a much larger scale and using the directions of the compass to make a right turn. The practice expedition was incredibly useful, as I gained a lot of confidence and positivity when I got the nods of my teacher that I was making the right turns. I thought to myself, “maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all”, moreover, you could feel the lift of mood among the group as we would talk a lot more and joke around. Yes, it was tiring, yes, my legs were still as numb as before, but I completed my own objective, and I was proud.
Day 3 & 4:
One step forward, three steps back — Was exactly how I’d describe how day 3 went, I came into it fully rested after not having to hike on Wednesday and with the expectation that I had finished the two hardest routes. However, this couldn’t be less true since right before the hike had started, my friend who had already done the route told me that it was 2 hours of nothing but climbing, and my teacher who had checked the weather forecast in which there was an 80% chance of raining that day. Pathetic fallacy at its finest. Needless to say, my friend didn’t lie because this was the toughest challenge yet physically, and I fought hard to keep the intrusive thoughts away, this wasn’t the case of deciding to go left or right any more but more of a direct challenge using both arms and legs.
Even with the added experience from Routes 1 and 2, our group was struggling with the tough climbs, I struggled especially hard mentally, dealing with intrusive thoughts, like the fact that I could fall off the cliff or that I’d get a massive cut. There was a 2-hour period of the route that we did on day 3, where it had been raining cats and dogs and I was genuinely scared because now, on top of the already unsteady climbs, it was freezing cold and slippery. I fell once or twice, but I found myself extremely focused on the process and having no regard for the dirty mud or sand that would’ve affected me greatly if it wasn’t for this experience. I wouldn’t be crazy to say that this was one of the harder reality checks that I got and how fortunate I am, to not worry about hygiene or the availability of any resources in my life. Nowadays, I often find myself telling myself to be grateful about X, whether it’d be being grateful for my functioning and well leg after I get injured or my body after I get an upset stomach. You realize that you don’t notice something’s important until you’ve lost it already (Cliché, but facts).
I wasn’t kidding when I said this experience was so impactful for me because I’ve developed deeper connections with classmates that I wouldn’t have in my day-to-day school life, I had so much fun on the last day because I think that everyone knew it was coming to an end, and we really powered through it. The intensity was about the same as the day before, but it felt easy since everyone was in a good mood.
Without a doubt, the best moments came down to when we sang “Santa Tell Me” by Ariana Grande for the whole day non-stop which took away the numbness in my feet for brief moments, certainly haven’t had that good of a karaoke session in a long time!
I don’t want to hear a thing about our singing skills, because I know it was fantastic!
Thanks for reading, and see you all in a bit.
-Winnie 14/12/2022
