terengganu: chapter 1

this is a pretty late update about my recent camp in terengganu.

a few days before the start of new semester, shuhada ask me if i want to attend a camp, as a representative of usrah institution. (then, the place was unknown) i was a bit reluctant at first, but i said yes anyway.

three days before leaving, i was informed about the said location and duration of the camp. (5 days and terengganu!) i was delighted at the prospect of getting to land my feet again in terengganu but not the 5 days! (skipping some of my first lectures? not an attractive prospect) so, i called up my president and told him i was not going. to add to my predicament of not going, i suffered from an injury during gym session the day before. (i exaggerated the pain)

however, thanks to some unknown reason (even i don't know what came into me) i later decided to attend the camp anyway. so, the same old routine of messaging the president and told him that i change my mind, again. =___="

and i didn't manage to find another member from usrah who actually wants to go until 1 day before we were supposed to depart from MMU. and the other person is thankfully, my lovely and nutty vice president kak ain.

so, on the said day, (21 january) all of the participants, around 70 people, gather at stad building before leaving. by the way, i also found out that everyone else who were joining the camp are clubs and societies presidents and their vices. i guess somebody forgot to informed me and kak ain before hand that this was a presidents' council binding camp. however, since we were already there, we just acted like one. there was a briefing session given by mr omar (stad manager) and mr bakhtiar (stad councilor) once the briefing was done, we aboard the bus. (at first, i fear that we had to take MMU buses, but thankfully, it wasn't. the nightmare of my last trip to port dickson with mmu bus still lingers in my head, the noise and everything)

hence, starts our extremely long (and extended) journey to terengganu. our camp location was besut, so we had to take the road that is usually taken when you are heading to kelantan. we had in total three stops during the journey, the first one was at genting sempah (for dinner and prayers), the second one was at some isolated petronas (which don't even sell mineral water) in a small town of which i failed to recall the name. and the third stop was in gua musang, where some of us(including me) enjoyed some super late supper or extremely early breakfast.

we finally reached our destination in besut, around 6.15am. the journey itself took almost half a day! (12 hours?) upon arrival, we were greeted by the camp commander, who later assigned all of us to our respective rooms. four in a room for guys and 3 in a room for gals. i think most of us were satisfied with our rooms since it was clean, comfortable, air-conditioned and has it's own bathroom.

our camp had officially begun. after the very very very long journey, we expected to be allowed to rest before actually starting the programme. we were wrong. soon after being assigned to our rooms, we were told to fresh up and gather in the main hall at 830 am for our first programme! complaints were heard everywhere, but we did went to the hall anyway.

much to our dismayed, we discovered that our camp was full of, none other than, talks, talks and more talks!! of course we were pissed off at the prospect of coming all the way to terengganu just to sit and listen to, erm, talks?!!

enter the turmoil period of the camp. there was so many problems that we were concerned about. the first one being the fact that all of the facilitators and emcee, deliver their speech or announcement in bahasa melayu. there was a pretty prominent numbers of international students among us, who seem to be questioning the reason they were drag all the way here just to sit and listen to people talking in a foreign language to them. after some heated debate among the student council reps and the organizer and our stad councilor, somebody came up with some 'genius' solution. oh, let us separate the international students of MMU from their local counterparts! thus, in order to 'avoid' communication problem, the organizer brought all the international students away. they told the rest of us that they would be conducting a special session with them. we were splitted into two group for the whole day!

the day was filled with session of the importance of being patriotic and internal politics. by the end of the day, we were all to weary, angry and a mix of hostile feeling towards the whole event. and to make it worse, we were still super tired from the long journey!

to be continued (sebab aku di library dan kena balik)