We did a lot of cooking at the Beirut camp today. Actually, I should say we tried to do a lot of cooking at the Beirut camp today. The “Bears” (our youngest group) learned to make rice krispie treats. Of course it was totally a mess and our 4-10 year olds could only help out so much, but they had a great time, and I think we all appreciated having a little dessert with our lunch today.
The “Tigers”, on the other hand, made solar-powered hot dog cookers in science class! By creating a convex, reflective surface, the theory is that sunlight will converge to a “focal point” that will be very hot. In an ideal world, the kids would have been able to cook our lunch with them. Instead, we ended up cooking almost all the hot dogs in the microwave. Pam put it best: “The kids are learning one of the most important rules of science: experiments seldom work as planned.”
Still, the hot dog cookers were by no means a complete failure! Not to toot my own horn, but my group’s cooker actually cooked 2 hot dogs! Sure, it took over 15 minutes and the hot dogs were only luke warm, but we’re pretty proud of it. Furthermore, the kids seem happier and better behaved than I have seen them all camp! One of our campers, Hassan, really embraced our project--not only did he want to rotate the hot dog skewers constantly, but he ran around the USJ campus yelling, “Hot Dogs for Sale!” This little businessman even earned 1,000 LL from a friendly professor (though we didn’t accept it, of course). Talk about life skills, haha!
