My youth group recently held a 'Survivor Night' and it was a huge success. Just like the popular reality TV show, we were broken up into tribes and competed in a series of challenges to determine the winner.
Setting up
Before the night began those of us who are leaders arrived around two hours early to set up and prepare for the night ahead.
My task was to assemble a sort of 'spider tunnel' to be a part of the obstacle course. Using metal stakes, fabric mesh, string line, and a handful of cable ties I managed to create a 1x1 metre tunnel, about 15 metres long.
The tunnel reminded me of the one of the 'Great Escape' tunnels from the popular book/film about a WWII breakout of a POW Camp. The only difference is it was above ground and between each pair of posts was string line like a web to make crawling through difficult—perhaps too difficult as I got caught when my tribe crawled through!
The other challenges we had were battleship, sock wrestling and the obstacle course. Before we could start, we had to have our Tribal Ceremony to split off into our four tribes.
Teamwork
Just like the show we had bandanas of four colours (blue, red, yellow, green) and one by one each person randomly picked from a bowl to get a sent to a team.
Once everyone had been sorted into tribes we put on our war paint, I went for an 'Uruk-Hai' hand across the side of my face, others had the simple stripes on the cheeks, there were a few 'William Wallace' stripes and one or two 'Tonto' style eye paints—we were now ready to go
With battleship, it was just like the board game, two teams lobbing water bombs to the other side while we sit like ships as a single, two or three groups and once we had been hit according to our ship size we were sunk.
After this it was sock wrestling; only it was held on a tarp covered in soapy water. The contests were quite intense as people wrestled to take off the other person's sock. One of our leaders, who is quite tall, lost to one of the younger guys—a David vs. Goliath battle if ever I saw one! History did end up repeating itself.
Our final challenge was the obstacle course and did it push us to the limits, we had to go through play equipment, under some tarps, through a tunnel, over and under some 'saw horses' then crawl through my spider tunnel to end on a tarp covered in soapy water, lucky I bought a change of clothes for the ride home.
All in all it was a great night and a nice break to do something very different that we hadn't done before, now on to planning for the next Survivor Night!
Christopher Archibald lives in Sydney and is a Youth Leader at New Life Christian Church in Blacktown. A voracious reader, he ploughs through many books in a calendar year, with a bookcase that is constantly being rearranged to accommodate new additions.
Christopher Archibald's previous articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/christopher-archibald.html