Reflections on Creating Wilderness Survival Programs for Kids

WildChina Education has been providing experiential learning programs to students for two decades. 20 years ago, though international schools had outdoor education, and service-learning programs in their curriculums, the concept of experiential learning was new in China. The infrastructure was just not set up for school trips meaning that arranging an off-campus excursion was a nightmare like that of which could only be solved by logistical experts. That was where we found our niche 20 years ago – overcoming the challenges of the environment to provide safe, meaningful, high-impact, educational curriculum outside of the orderly confines of a classroom.

Growing up, I loved school trips. Now, as an adult and professional, working on school trips I can genuinely appreciate the sacrifice, time, thought, and money!! that went into creating these poignant lifelong memories for me. I don’t remember what I learned in history in 4th grade, but I remember the first hardship hike I did up to the top of a mountain around the Nepal/Tibet border. I was carrying my own sleeping bag and sleeping mat and the hike just would not end – I remember gritting my teeth and finding strength within myself that I didn’t even know that I had to carry on. How valuable is that? The benefits I’ve experienced from learning fortitude and resilience in the face of physical and mental hardship is intangibly great.

Last week we did a hike that was 8.7km up and down an elevation of 750m (850 to 1600m and back). It was a hard hike. One kid in particular who was not used to physical exercise had a particularly painful time. A little less than halfway up he said, “I just want to give up, can we stop doing this now?” It reminded me so much of myself at his age. I said “Well, the only way to stop this is to finish it.” He started hiking faster (little did he know he still had 4 hours left).

By far the most rewarding moment for me this year, professionally, was when I heard this boy (who, like many others at his age, is obsessed with online gaming) reach the summit of the mountain and say: “Yeah I think the feeling of hiking and getting to the top is better than any gaming thing.” This is what I live for and this is what keeps our team at WildChina Education inspired, and passionate about our jobs. 

This summer, these programs that we previously only contracted out to schools as part of their outdoor ed or service-learning programs were offered for the first time to parents and their kids. (To parents to sign their kids up, not for parents to come on the trip!).

Whether it’s a school trip or a summer program I inevitably get asked by parents, “Can we come too?” The answer is always no. Kids tend to be different when they’re away from their parents. These programs that we design and run are meant to be growth experiences for the kids, they need to be able to test the wind beneath their own wings, so to speak.

One kid this summer kept telling me that his mom’s cooking was better than the food at the canteen. I told him, “I’m sure that’s true, but what do you do when you can’t have your mom’s cooking.” This devolved into an extended conversation about how “food at 5-star restaurants was OK,” but not regular restaurants and how only then he could “tolerate not eating his mom’s cooking.” Fast forward one day: we had the kids go to a local market with budgets of 10RMB/person. They had to work in teams to create a menu, buy their supplies, and prepare a meal on the mountain top for themselves to eat. We had so much delicious food that night. That same boy made curry udon noodles with spam, onions, potato, garlic, and cabbage and ate (I kid you not) 5 bowls of it. He said to me, “that’s the best curry I’ve ever had,” I asked him, “I thought you only liked your mom’s cooking and 5-star restaurants?” He said “No, I said only sometimes (he definitely did not), actually food like this is really good – I could eat this every day and it only cost like 40 kuai, that’s so good.” I rather think that the next time he goes to a 5-star restaurant he will say/think ‘That’s so expensive, my curry udon was better and it was only 40RMB.’

Some kids don’t get enough attention at home, and some kids get too much. When kids go on a trip with just their peers and without their parents – they get the same exact amount of attention from our staff. Whiny kids whine less, quiet kids come out of their shells, shy kids make friends and bullies learn that they can only get away with so much when everybody is together all the time. Trust me, I’ve been designing and running programs like this for almost a decade.

In the end, the activities we choose and programs we put together serve one purpose: to give our next generation experiences that they can draw on to solve real life problems. Sure, there might not be a math equation involved where there is right or wrong answer, but when you ask kids to use bamboo and rope to create a functioning raft you get them to think about physics, teamwork, division of labor, time management, and associating a successful project with so much joy, fun and fulfillment. 

When you ask kids to carry their own trash down a mountain after hiking and camping you encourage (or force) them to think about the environment and just how it takes real actions, real sweat and effort, to protect our Earth. It teaches them to think ahead about the implications of what they’re taking up the mountain, because they will have to suffer the results on the way back down. Don’t we want to teach our kids that all actions have corresponding consequences? Don’t we all need a little bit more of this in today’s societies?

Of course, these programs also always have a more-than healthy dose of fun, excitement, fresh environments. Put all the activities, teamwork, and learning together and you create experiences that these future adults can draw on to guide them through a lifetime of problems.

The summer program we run for kids aged 9 – 12 is called Wilderness Survival, but in reality what they walk away with is an in-depth look at How to Thrive at Life.

I leave you with a photo I took of what the kids told me they learned that week.

“[I have] more strength than I thought I had before”

“How many times I can get back up”

“Empathy/Kindness”

“Endurance”

“Teamwork”

“How long we can survive without a phone”