5:30 is so very early!!! (Thur. May 28

Yes that is the time I woke up this morning to get a shower! I took a shower and headed straight back to bed but unfortunately couldn’t get back to sleep so I finally pulled myself out of bed about 6:45 and got ready for breakfast at 7:15. Okay so I will take this time to now say that we have the best food! Everything is homemade It is so awesome! I hear the camp is not like this but right now I’m enjoying it! We have devotion during breakfast and a member of the church we are staying at gave it. It was great. He told some stories of trips he has been on with youth groups traveling to TeamEffort camps. It was very uplifting and made me very excited to start seeing the youth groups at the camps. Next came first aid training from 8-12. It started off pretty boring but just as we began talking about what to do if someone was unconscious one of my fellow staffers passed and starting convulsing. He was sitting across the aisle from Sydney and me and when his head hit the floor it hit right where Syd’s feet were. Pretty scary for us…. Turns out everything was okay and the nurses teaching us first aid took care of him J Then some more tedious learning and then we broke into smaller groups to practice some of the things we learned. I can now bandage people’s bleeding wounds, splint broken limbs with newspapers and ace bandages, drag an unresponsive person from an area of danger to an area of safety, do CPR on children and adults and do the Heimlich maneuver!  I even got my very own first aid kit with my name on it! (PS we got some other really cool stuff the first day like t-shirt and water bottles and such) The first aid training was followed by lunch and my turn to pray in the chapel. Side note here: One really awesome thing we do here at staff training is pray all day! The theme for Teameffort is “Pray as you go”, so every year they have a prayer vigil set up and you sign up for 30-minute prayer slots. We go into this really beautiful prayer chapel and we have stations set up with things to pray about such as staffers, campers, and other things. It really is an awesome experience. It maybe my favorite so far…. Then we had to split into groups to make a rules video to play for our campers explaining the rules of the camp. You are supposed to do it with your individual staff group, but since we only have three staffers we joined with another group. We filmed all afternoon and I think our video is going to be really cute. It is like a Family Feud game show type thing with commercial breaks. A little free time then another camp meeting. We were put with the camp that we will be helping out with the first week of camp, so we could get to know them a little. Dinner then group meeting. Our group meeting was about the first day of worship that we will be conducting in a couple of weeks. We will be giving the talks, but Teameffort staff outlines them so it is sort of like this is what you can talk about and add in your own things. Okay that is confusing but I hope you understand! It was a great worship experience and I only hope that our staff can bring the kind of worship we had tonight to our youth groups! Now we are in free time and I will shortly go to bed. I’m emotionally and physically drained. I’m not sure if this is a sign as to how the rest of the trip will go or not, but I think it might be. I’m trying to decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing…