TIme for a scroller
I deal with kids who have issues , some violent , all with abuse issues andhang over problems from that ...
When I took this on , I was lead to believe that I was going to be dealing with fairly "normal" kids no issues , but it didnt work out that way , I got the violent ones , the ones that had plain run out of places to be put cos no-one would have em .
After seeing what they did to my home , I got smart and took them camping instead , let em wreck the bush if they can
there is no lasting damage they can realy do there
this made a change in the kids so dramatic it is hard to believe , and in short order it evolved into standard practice , give the kid a kit apropriate to their age , responsibility for them to wash their own eating gear , set up n pack up their tent / tarp shelter and bedding . and take them into the bush by long windy track that had them as lost as lost can be .
we fish , build shelters , catch yabbies barehands , track critters and stalk them hunting is for the kids I know can handle it tho , we pan for gold as well ... the kids have a go , and usualy do dam well , they all go home with at least a well used bedroll , tent and eating gear , and a heap of stories .
Some of these guys have been coming back for years , others come once or twice , some are in my home full time , so far we had no complaints
no-one talks about survival skills tho , its either bush stuff or home stuff , and doing bush stuff at home when the power goes out ... or having been busted by the park ranger for spearing fish in the pond and cooking them on the free BBQ ( true story , kid ran away from home for a while but she got busted and returned , hey , she coulda been whoring for food instead .. )
what to me is the biggest skills the kids learn that have a definite bearing on their long term survival as people is that they are worth something , they can do things and achieve things , regardless of who their parents are or what they arent ... they dont need to follow the flock but can do their own thing .
OK , maybe they will never again set foot in the bush for the rest of their lives , but the changes them kids make any are dramatic , I can tell story after story of kids who decided being a tough guy and bully wasnt fun anymore , girls who decided that they were worth more than the putdowns their "friends" were giving them and changed their whole social set
we do nothing strange , just lead by example .
We copped a LOAD of flack over this when we had a new youth worker come on staff and decide that what we were doing as carers was far from apropriate , kids needed to know social skills and patriotic values not what she termed "survival skills" that would turn them into savages and ferals ...
after a lot of flack , I am so soured on the term "survival" that it is not funny to me it was camping , putting the kids in a environment where hey had to drop their normal barriers and contribute ...
so when folk ask me why I do survival stuff , I give em a short and curt "Its traditional business" and leave it at that now , it usualy puts most folk off asking further ...
OTOH , if they seem seriously interested , not a stuffed shirt from a govt dept poking their nose where its not wanted , I got time to share and exlain and show .
TO me its about being adaptable , cooking is cooking , the heat source differs , that is all , sleeping is sleeping , I can do it anywhere , pretty much , shelter is shelter , the draft gets bad some places more than others ... but survival is about being flexable and adaptable , way more than having a huge skill set , IMHO anyway
