Helaman's Camp--Wednesday

Wednesday

Last week I went to Helaman’s Camp, it was awesome. The food was great and the company was even better. We started at 7:00am so that we could be up there in time to get the camp set up for the District Leaders and Companions to arrive. It was about an hour and a half drive past Strawberry Reservoir, and we arrived with plenty of time to spare getting everything ready. The first thing we did was set up our “Chapel”. It was the place where all our mission meetings would be held and it would provide shelter from the sun and wind. Basically, a huge tarp canopy large enough  to squeeze 150 people inside, plus a sound system, podium, and piano. Yes, we did have electricity up in the middle of nowhere somehow, would have hated that installation job…. The next thing we did was name to port-o-potties. I don’t know why we did this, but for some reason we came up for clever names for each of the ten potties. With names ranging from Jackie Chan to Obi-Won, for the rest of camp we always joked about which potty was the smelliest or most user friendly. Obi-Won was by far my favorite, although there was the constant fear of being tipped over because it was at the end of the row. Because the trailer with all the tents in them achieved a flat on the way up, we had to wait for them to arrive before we could start setting up our Zone’s tents and living area. Once the tents did arrive Richard Bruner and I were lucky enough to get the newest tents and the oldest canopy. Needless to say, the canopy was broken. So we got the biggest canopy as well, which ironically enough, we never ended up using because of the freak weather conditions and the pain it was to set it up, we ended up taking it down and not re-setting it back up again until almost the end of the camp. 

After that we had dinner, it was the most amazing dinner on the face of the planet, imagine, 100 steaks, averaging about the size of your dinner plate, to be shared by 16 teenagers, now imagine there not being any left-over’s, that was what our dinner was like, it was divine!  Then Richard and I got personal study time until out zone members arrived. Personally I almost fell asleep multiple times, but Richard had given me a challenge to find all 6 of the times in the Book of Mormon in which it says “remember remember”, it was a hard challenge, and I still have only found  5 of them.  Once the zone members arrived, all chaos broke loose, we were given a list of names and told to find people who we had never seen before in our life, imagine hard. This is probably the only part of camp that could have been done better, the confusion of getting everyone to find the correct zones. Finally, once we had everyone situated in the correct tents it was time for the first mission meeting. The entire day had been overcast with sporadic rain fall and blustery winds, and this caused the walls of the chapel to snap almost making it hard to hear the speaker.

 The most memorable talk was given by President Scoresby he spoke on how to become like Christ, which was the main focus of the whole camp. It set the tone for the rest of the camp and we felt the spirit for the rest of the next 4 days. This meeting is also where the trouble began, a member of our zone wasn’t quite as diligent to listen to the lesson as would be expected at a camp like this one. Richard, being the strong, militaristic leader that he is, noticed him dumping Pringles chips on the ground in our chapel among other atrocities. Our leadership styles sort of clashed a bit on this matter when after the meeting he took the young man aside and proceeded to reprimand him rather heavily for his behavior. I understood his motives for such a strong reprimand, and I felt they were just, but I also understood that the young man probably didn’t get the same picture. For the rest of the week there was tension between the two men, one trying to practice leadership, while the other tried to deny it. And I got to see just how great a leader Richard is because I watched him willingly humble himself and apologize multiple times when he’d rather explode and punch the kid, and that is a quality of a great leader. 

After the meeting it was time for bed, everyone went to bed rather well except for Jared’s tent, he kept them up late showing them the fine art of blue dart’s. Finally, I got out of my tent and politely asked them to “knock it off”, actually, that’s what I wanted to say, what I actually said was: “I know your having a lot of fun, but there are others in the camp trying to sleep and your making a lot of noise, do you think you could be a bit quieter?” I got back in my sleeping bag and within 30 minutes everyone was asleep, even me. The first day was done.