The Gender War

Isabella Eleanor Nubari

Sec 1A      ( 9 )

16 April 2010

Personal Recount

                                                            The Gender War

The luckiest day of my life was  when I was back in my homeland, Jakarta, in Indonesia. I always used to played pranks on other people, namely boys, as they always tease me. So the legendary ‘Gender War’ was naturally an elite challenge for my profession. It was during a camp in the mountains and me and my female classmate friends were in the ‘headquarters’, plotting our next ‘attack’ on the boys. Unknown to the teachers, we have been playing countless pranks on each other throughout the first few days of the camp, with a wide variety of creative pranks  which  includes adding red water coloring in the boy’s water bottle and reported to the teachers that they ‘smuggled’ grape juice into their rooms ( we were not allowed to bring any food or beverages except water into our rooms ) and their returned thanks of sabotaging us in the race through the tunnels by removing one of our batteries in our torchlight.

 Of course, we weren’t supposed to tell the teachers about the ‘raids’ of sabotage and pranks as they were one of the ‘rules’ of the ‘game’. You see, the old tradition of that school is always the gender war at the year-end camp. Each gender would go through many months of planned attacks for the war during the camp. The rules were simple . The first rule would be “Safety’s first”, as any injuries would result as ‘foul play’. Second is “ No reporting”, as the game would automatically end with both gender losing and surrendering to the no-ending lecture of our teachers. And the third one would be “Which side pulled the most pranks wins ” , and as of that , I am pretty confident the girls would win, the score now was 7 to 8 , with girls in the lead. The fourth and final rule is “winning team gets losing team to serve them for a month”. That, was the best prize ever and we, the girls, are determined to win it.

We had our lunch and were sitting in a circle in our room, discussing the details of the attacks tomorrow, which was the final day of the  camp. As we finalized the details of our hard work, we prepared the necessary props for our ‘ Bonfire Attack ‘ tonight as well as reflecting on the prank the boys pulled on us last night, which was dressing up as ghosts and flashing past the female’s windows. When we got curious enough and sneaked a look from the door, they shocked us by appearing suddenly in front of us. We shouted on instinct and handed over one point to them, still, as I said, we were leading by one close point.  

We planned to pour water into their campfire wood so it could not fire as well as throw a stink-bomb into their rooms tomorrow. As the final day of the camp arrived, and the war  period  over, we, the girls, won by 2 points as they too also poured water into our campfire wood and resulted as an ‘even’ round, though the teachers were still puzzled why the wood got so wet. That day, where the girls was proclaimed ‘victor’ of the gender war was the luckiest day of my life. I had struck gold, the other female classmates and I had 20 guys to order around for the whole of the next month, starting the ‘ female occupation’. I guess what made me really feel lucky is the fact that I and my female friends have proven that we were not inferior to boys, maybe even better than them in areas such as playing pranks.

All in all, I really felt bliss and joy, what I would describe as lucky.