Project week was a great experience, it was my first time planning a week long trip with no supervision. My group and I travelled to Tioman Island located off the coast of eastern Malaysia. On Tioman Island, my group and I took our advanced open water diving course. This course spanned the duration of two days, on the other days where we weren’t doing anything, our group participated in the ‘Project Aware’ speciality courses. During these courses, we learned more about the aquatic life underwater and how we can protect it. On one of the ‘Project Aware’ courses, we cleaned up the Crown Of Thorns which look like starfish and eat the coral. They leave a white trail of coral which basically means that section of the coral was dead.
On the trip, I didn’t really learn more about myself, but about those around me. During the planning stages, our group encountered an issue with one of the group members not paying his side of the project week. This annoyed one of our group members, but eventually, he tried to let it go. After that, the same group member forgot his passport when we had already boarded the bus. Also, he almost left his passport on the ferry, luckily, one of our group members saw and reminded him. I learned that there are people out there who don’t have much experience with independence and travelling on their own, because if that person did, then he wouldn’t have forgotten something as crucial as their passports.
The two aspects of CAS that we chose to focus on was Activity and Service. For service, as mentioned before, we completed a specialist course where we learnt about the crown of thorns which eat coral and how to get rid of them. For service, we also completed a beach clean up. For Activity, we completed our Advanced Open Water diving course.
Overall, the main challenge that we faced as a group would be planning the trip. To overcome this and to make sure that everything went smoothly. As a group, the four of us had to maintain constant communication with each other as well as the organisation that we were planning to do the diving with. With our strong communication as a group, we managed to plan for all situations and were constantly helping each other as well as giving out reminders about important things.
In the end, Project week was a wonderful experience even though there were ups and downs along the way.
