Tuesday began bright
and early with a wakeup call, not from students’ confiscated cellphones, but
from Tomas, our resident Baltic Viking musician playing the bagpipes and
knocking on cabin doors along with Simas. They invited us to join them for
morning exercises that included stretching, an ancient war dance, and “bear
fights.”
To kick off the theme
of the day, “Our World: Countries, Languages, and Democracies,” we wrote
questions about the theme on paper leaves and affixed them to the Tree of Knowledge. We hoped to have the questions answered
during the day, and when we did, the leaves fell and we replaced them with
flowers.
We drew names for our
Secret Friends whom we will surprise with uplifting and inspiring notes during
the week.
To learn more about
the three countries we represent, everybody participated in quizzes and games
and learned interesting facts such as: most Lithuanian-Americans and
Polish-Americans live in Chicago; the national bird for Lithuania is the stork;
and Poles do not use the Euro.
To follow that, students
taught each other 18 useful phrases in Lithuanian and Polish such as smacznego and skanaus, which mean “enjoy your meal” in Polish and Lithuanian
respectively. These were real tongue
twisters for the Americans who had the extra challenge of learning the phrases
in both languages! To reinforce our
understanding of the phrases, we played language football and all the teams won
football-shaped (soccer, for you American readers!) candies.
After lunch, we were
honored by a visit from US Embassy Cultural Atttache Althea Cawley-Murphree and
three others, and by a lecture about the constitutions of the Baltic States
given by Dr. Ieva Deviatnikovaite, a professor of constitutional law from the
Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius who is also a former Fulbright scholar.
During some free time
dedicated to sports, a group learned an African dance, others played a rousing
game of beach volleyball, and a group played Zip-zap, a lively circle game.
After dinner, we
played intellectual games that focused on democracies and other forms of
government. We played a matching game
with flags, forms of government, heads of state, and capital cities. During other games, such as Jeopardy, we learned
that the first written constitution in the world was adopted in the United
States in 1787 and the Polish-Lithuanian State was second in 1791. We learned
the important role constitutions play in creating the foundation of
democracies. A talk and video reinforced
the value of democratic government and the vital role that citizens play in
maintaining a strong and stable government.
To end the evening, we
celebrated the 17th birthday of Ryan, one of the American students,
with three traditional Lithuanian tree cakes and then ended the very full day by
sharing friendships around the campfire.
