Silent Weekend

Silent weekend was something else. I left Goshen around 1 and ended up in Ohio around 8ish. The four of us (all from ASL) found the campsite, almost getting lost. The goal of the weekend: not to talk, but to improve on our signing. We stepped out of the car and from that moment forward we couldn't speak.
When we registered, the lady who helped us was named Nan. She was so expressive when she was signing, I was sure she was deaf (come to find out later that weekend, she definitely wasn't). We each got buttons with our names on them, a paper with questions to ask each other (an icebreaker at most), and a silent weekend pocket knife : )
The hardest part of the weekend?: Putting up the tent, in the dark, communicating with only sign language. Hm. That was rough...and it was freezing cold. We all tried to avoid this problem by leaving early, but our attempts failed.

The next day me and the group of girls I came with decided we would go to the pumpkin festival nearby. The rules of the weekend were that we couldn't speak, on and off camp. This meant, that even though everyone else around us at the festival wasn't deaf or wasn't apart of our "Silent Weekend", we still had to respect the rules. Ridiculous as this seemed, it was all apart of the weekend.
We each had a card to carry around with us that day to explain our mission and the reason why we couldn't speak; some understood, but most didn't. People would still "mouth" words to us or talk really loud, thinking that we were deaf. My friends and I would just laugh about it, kind of feeling bad that we were putting people in that situation.





..this guy said "are you trying to get a picture of me?"
I just smiled at him and shook my head yes like I was a little kid.




This pumpkin was enormous.

Everything at the festival was covered in pumpkin. "Pumpkin Hamburger"-"Pumpkin Ice Cream"-"Pumpkin Pie"-"Pumpkin Soup"


The rest of the weekend we played some games with each other on the camp site and ate meals together. It was such a good time to expound on my ASL vocabulary. Everyone was so patient with me, teaching me new words and repeating themselves a half-a-dozen times. It was just one of those awkward places you put yourself in to improve.
For me, I improved on not only ASL, but I also proved to myself that I can actually go a whole weekend without talking. Definitely a record breaking moment in my opinion.