Before I got a place in the WSJ, I attended the Hampshire selection weekend.
The point of this weekend was to see who got a place on WSJ, and who went on Project 27, an alternative expedition that Hampshire runs at the same time as the Jamboree. There were 330 young people who attended this weekend, and only 144 places.
We went to Ferny Crofts campsite on Friday night, and we had to sign in in the main building, before going to find our subcamp. We had 4 subcamps, Australia, Canada, Mexico and Japan, I was in the Japan subcamp. Each subcamp was given a 30 minute slot to turn up, ours was the first at 19:00.
When we found our subcamp, we got assigned a number and had to wait till we were called up, so they could tell us where we needed to put our tents up. The had us all arranged in neat rows, to make sure that we could all fit in the area. I had a small 2 person tent to myself, and I had it nearly set up, on the end of a row, but they decided to move me to the other side under the trees, as I was originally next to a 5 man tent which had quite long guy ropes.
After everyone had all set up, they gathered our subcamp’s event shelters ,to welcome us and to be debriefed on what would happen at the weeknd, and tell us a bit more about the WSJ and Project 27. We then ate dinner, and then we had some free time, to socialise and get to know some new people, as generally, we didn’t know people, then we went to bed.