Mystery Gateway Building

 You might be wondering from the title, what is a mystery gateway building? Well, like the name suggests, we had to build a structure without knowing what it was. 

Just 2 days ago, as part of our SLC Training, Rover Andrew wanted us to participate in a pioneering activity with a special twist. Instead of letting us know what we were building, he only sent the structure design to 2 of my batchmates, Gabriel and Aide, and both of them were tasked to lead this pioneering project. Being the ICs of this project, they also had to instruct us to take the required amount of logistics.

As soon as we got all our poles and ropes to the parade square, both Gabriel and Aide immediately started to brief us on the structure we were doing. Due to the complexity of the structure, the rest of us were split into 2 and each group had to build a specific part of the gateway. In each mini group, another IC had to be appointed to ensure that everything was going smoothly. After some discussion, I was then appointed as the IC of my group.

What my group had to do was to build a simple x frame with 2 supports while what the other group had to do was to build 2 tripods.

However, although it may sound simple,    things did not exactly plan. Each time we raised our frame, the top part of it was always too heavy and we had to bring it down and retire it a few times. Apart from that, we also faced the difficulty of having to use poor quality ropes, which made the overall experience of pioneering fairly challenging.

Being put in the spot of an IC, the one thing that I realized was crucial was the communication between me and both Gabriel and the aide. The communication we had needed to be strong if not instructions on the structure cannot be properly disseminated to my group.

After some time, I soon got to have a rough idea of what the structure was going to look like and motivated my group to not give up and do their best. Eventually, we managed to get the structure up, and honestly, I was quite impressed that we managed to raise the structure as it was our first time executing such a structure.

Overall, I feel that this way of pioneering is interesting and effective at the same time as it requires the IC to really step up and step out of his comfort zone to give instructions to everyone. This also allows the IC to really feel the pressure when being in the shoes of a leader. 

Us Connecting the various parts of the structure