About two weeks later

So this summer I had the opportunity to go to Louisiana for six weeks. While we were there, me and four other college students worked at a summer camp for about three hundred kids in Covington, Louisiana. To read more about it go to louisianaexperiment.blogspot.com.

And now we have been home about two weeks. It was probably some of the hardest, yet most rewarding six weeks of my life. It was hard because I had so many expectations of what the trip would be like and it really was not what I had expected. It was hard because I wanted to do things my way but I had to learn to let go so that I could learn from the people that I was around. But it was so rewarding. The people there were so hospitable and really appreciated us being there even though it really did not feel like such a big deal what we were doing.

What was also rewarding was the people from Riverside that I went down with: Josiah, Alisha, Ben and Rachel. The entire time we were in Louisiana, these people were not far from me. We spent a lot of our free time together. But these past two weeks, I have had to learn to be myself again. We have all gone back to our lives. Ben is at navy training/camp/something. Josiah is hanging out with his friends and pretty soon he is moving to North Carolina, which I am so excited for him but I really am going to miss him. Alisha and Rachel help out with the jr. high at the Grove and this past week they were at camp for that. So they are living their own life. And pretty soon I will move back to APU for my sophmore year of college. I gained somewhat of a family through these people and they have no idea how happy they make me whenever I look at pictures from the trip.

One of the things that I miss the most about Louisiana is my group of kids. I worked with the 5-7 age group and truly they made me so happy even though they drove me crazy a lot of the time. I lost my voice for three days because of cheers and yelling (I sounded like a man). I had to apply first aid to many of the kids, many times because they would not stop getting hurt. One kid flipped me off because he was asking me what it meant. I had to take so many things from them that they had in their mouth. During Bible and Character, I had to repeat myself countless times. To get the kids to actually listen to me, I did everything from bribing them with popsicles to threatening them with punishment, which was going to the office.

But then other times they made me fall in love. So many times, the kids told me that I was pretty or that they liked my hair. Countless times, kids from other groups asked to be in my red group. After a challenge made by me to memorize Philippians 4:13, one kid actually was able to memorize it (he was 6). When they smiled, it melted away any evil thought I had about strangling them. It's because they smiled when they were having fun or they were happy or when they were getting their picture taken. Seriously, I miss these kids so much. Here are just a few of them.

Well I think that is it for now.

"Without music, life is a journey through a desert" Pat Conroy