guantanamo soup

I arrived early doors in Segovia (town near Madrid) to get picked up and taken to village where the camp was because there aren't any buses to get there.....

Shoehorned into the back of a tiny car with a Spanish woman who was our boss, an Indonesian guy, a Scottish woman who has lived in Spain for 14 years and a guy who grew up in Spain, studied in UK has an Irish dad and an Indonesian mum we set off for Fuente Pelayo. As they all knew each other they were pretty relaxed but I was quite frankly asking what I'd let myself in for. Joanna, Scottish woman, and Nick, Spain/UK/Ireland/Indonesia, are both monitors at the camp; generally monitors need to be extroverted and happy to do pretty much anything and these guys are no exception. At the time I felt like I'd signed up to serve aboard the Black Pearl, they were screaming and laughing all the way to the camp and I was worried I wasn't going to fit in. As it was I needn't have been concerned, I soon discovered how friendly they were and that laughing as hard as you could was the best way to get through this camp - the alternative was crying.

It soon transpired that the money wasn't the only crap thing at this camp, the stories I heard about the food in the first hour of being there were making me very nervous. Andy, Indonesian guy, is Muslim so can't eat pork. Except that the only meat they serve in the camp, with the exception of 3 meals, is pork. So they make him a different meal. Sort of. In the first camp they'd done (remember a camp lasts 2 weeks) they refused to cook different meals and said the only thing they would make was fried eggs. The boss had told the kitchen staff to give him pork and tell him it was beef! So he ate a lot of eggs.

Thankfully in the camp I did they had bought more food and prepared him fish, chicken and other things, in fact a lot of the time his food was better than ours. For breakfast there were three 'meals' that were rotated in order: cola coa (hot chocolate) with concentrated juice and biscuits, cola coa with concentrated juice and fairy cakes, cola coa with concentrated juice and square shaped fairy cakes. Not the healthiest breakfast in the world but to be fair not that unusual for here, cereal isn't as big here and toast doesn't exist.

However, people in my experience at least normally have something mid morning or later to keep them going till lunchtime, which is about 2ish here and much more substantial than in the UK. Not at this camp though, the kids (and us) ate at 9 then didn't eat again till 1.45 by which time we were all fucking starving. I'm a big eater, I'll admit that but I am not by and large a fussy eater. Aside from tuna and hard boiled eggs I'll eat pretty much anything put in front of me yet even I struggled with some of the fodder on offer.

It's fair to say the food was basic, you'd expect that at any sort of camp but in 2 weeks we had salad twice, lentils once and vegetable soup three times. Aside from that I cannot remember eating any other vegetable aside from potatoes. There was rice with tomato frito (very basic tomato sauce) poured on top, spaghetti with tomato frito and chorizo, chicken noodle soup no less than 4 times (dubbed guantanamo soup), cold pork, pork 'steaks,' battered pork, pork omelette and a host of other dull carbohydrate rich meals. There was more than one occasion where we gave some of our own table's food to the kids and every single day without fail we had to race the flies to our meals. Last Monday the weekend kitchen staff had left out the watermelon (to be fair we did have fruit every other day) we'd had on Sunday night so come the morning the place was swarming with the buggers. It was slightly worse when the staff on Monday didn't bother to clean it away either and by lunchtime there were even more flies.

So the food was bad. The kids were, thankfully, great. A hundred times better than the class I'd had at the last camp I was genuinely sad to see them go. It was a small camp, only 50 kids compared to most camps which are 200 or more and that meant after 2 weeks I could name pretty much everyone which was nice. I'm not sure they learnt all that much but they seemed to have a blast and after a few days coercion, debate and finally submission they even sang Bohemian Rhapsody for the final day talent show.