My experience as a TTI survivor. Part four. An overview of life in the wilderness program.

In this blog I intend to give an overall view of what life was like in the wilderness program.

Daily and weekly routine. Five days a week you are forced to hike for most of the day carrying a backpack so heavy that it’s literally agony carrying it. If you dare to complain about the weight they add rocks to it to make it even heavier and if you complain about that the rocks are left in for the next day as well so you quickly learn not to complain. The two non hiking days are for group therapy and individual therapy. I regard the therapy as fake but at least on those days you had time to just relax and get to know each other.

Food and water. Most of the food is dried and packaged rubbish that you would refuse to eat if anything else was available. Once a week fresh water is delivered but it’s insufficient and runs out after afew days. Then you have to drink water from natural sources. The staff purified the water they drink but we had to drink it unpurified. I often drank visibly dirty water because it was either that or die of thirst. 

Zero privacy. Being in the wilderness if you needed to pee or poop you had to dig a hole and do it in that. While that’s only practical in that environment you would expect some privacy to do it. Not at all because you would have one of the staff with you. Humiliating.

The staff. The staff were two teams who alternately worked a week on on and a week off. Most of them were just callously indifferent to our safety and well-being but afew of them were blatantly sadistic and actively abusive. There was one guy who was truly a saint among sinners. He genuinely cared about us and did what little he could to make life more bearable for us.

The other kids. The other kids were great and I made some friends among them who I’ve kept in touch with.

This blog has been an overview of life in the program. In the next blog in this series I will share some specific memories and incidents.