Man! I spent 10 amazing days at training camp in Gainsville, Georgia. It was one of the most physically draining, sleep depriving, people loving, spiritually enhancing and Jesus loving week of my life. I loved every second of it. Even the crappy parts of it.
Training camp was great but hard at the same time. We slept in tents and hammocks most of the time. I have a bad back, so sleeping on the ground hurt, even though I have a really good sleeping pad. I realized after sleeping in a tent for 3 nights, a hammock would be so much better. I slept in my hammock almost every night after those 3 nights. I slept like a log. We had a couple nights where we had to sleep in different places to simulate different places that we may sleep. One night, we slept in huge tents meant for about 14 people. Luckily, we only have 7 guys. So, we had a ton of room. Sadly, the girls were literally sleeping on top of one another because there are so many of them. One night, we slept in one of the buildings to simulate an air port. The camp staff had the lights and air conditioning on all night and they played the same airport track over, and over, and over again on the speaker. I slept ok that night. It was funny because I would wake up almost every 2 hours and look around at everyone in the room. Half would be asleep and the other half would somewhat be awake.
We learned so much stuff at Training camp! We learned how to interact with different cultures, religions, laws, customs and many more different things. We learned a lot about Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Islam interested me the most out of the religions that we learned. I learned that the top 10 countries that Islam is the most dominant aren’t even in the middle east. I also learned that people who follow Islam believe in a lot of the prophets in the old testament of the bible including Noah, Jonah, Joseph, and Moses. They even believe in Jesus. But, they believe that Jesus is only a prophet and not the messiah. They believe that a prophet named Muhammad is the messiah. It was interesting to learn about Islam and to realize that they believe a lot of what we believe in and are monotheistic. We also learned a lot about how to share the Gospel, Evangelism, acts of service, discipleship, and communication.
You won’t believe half of the food that we ate. We had rice with almost every meal. I was fine with a ton of rice because I like rice, but some people got sick of eating it. Haha. I honestly didn’t know what half of the stuff was that we were eating it. I’m an adventurous person, so I tried everything that they put in front of me. One breakfast, they gave us a platter that had blue rice, scrambled eggs, a strange looking hard boiled egg and a big cup of fried crickets. I probably ate 2 cups worth of crickets. I really liked them and everyone else didn’t like them. They tasted like burnt and crispy pig skin. they weren’t bad at all. Now, the strange hard boiled egg was a very different story. I peeled the shell off and it was completely black. I cracked it open and the yoke in the middle was gray and black. It smelled terrible. But, me being me decided to eat it anyways. The girls looked like they were going to puke when I put the whole thing in my mouth. It was super chewy and was hard to swallow. It did not taste good! I can’t describe the taste. It was just mushy. After I had eaten it and almost coughed it up twice, one of the cooks came up to me and told me what it was. It was a duck egg that was half fertilized and was half hard boiled. I will never eat one of those things again! But, I’m always willing to put some weird looking food in my stomach. Being an adventurous person, I have to try everything.
I could go on and on about my adventures and what I learned at training camp! So, I’m going to post a couple of diffrent blog posts about my spiritual walk, my squad and a couple of other things. So, stay posted. I’ll write them really soon!
-Trevor Regan
