Training camp was a wonderful experience. I am going to try my best to include the highlights and give you a picture of what it was like for me and my fellow squadmates. I wrote the next three paragraphs at camp:
“The title for this article is ‘I’ve been trained’ which is a little misleading, I am actually still at training camp and I am still in the process of being trained. I just overheard a converstaion with another World Racer on the telephone with her mom and she described camp as “go, go, go.” I would agree with that description. I overheard her because we are in tents, and we had a rare window of “free time” in which I was choosing to catch up on sleep despite wanting to do other things instead (e.g. playing cards, getting to know my team, go swimming in the lake, basically anything that didn’t involve me sleeping in the middle of Georgia in the middle of summer in the middle of my sticky tent). Again, that description is not all that accurate. Yes, my tent is sticky, and surprisingly a lot smellier than I planned on it being at this point in the game, but being able to sleep in my own tent with my own stuff is more of a blessing than I am making it out to be, in fact I am glad and I feel refreshed.
I could go on for a while telling you about training camp, and I will likely go into more detail once I go home. However, for now, I will share some of the basics. There are three squads training at camp right now, two teams from September – it was originally one but it got split into two due to having too many people – and then my October Squad (the “S Squad”). To date, we’re the largest group to go through training camp and our squad is the largest squad. It can make it a little tricky though, because meeting and getting to know sixty something new people is a challenging task. We spend most of our days listening to sermons that are allowing us to deal with many of our issues from the past and get rid of extra emotional baggage that does not need to be packed on this trip. We also spend long amounts of time in worship which has been a wonderful way to help us keep our focus on the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then we engage in a lot of team building activities. When we are not doing these things, I feel like we are running around, sometimes literally – we’re required to meet at 7am and engage in some form of exercise as healthy living, which is highly recommended in the field. Then we sleep and do it all again.
I know this post is has not focused all that much on the Lord and my spiritual journey and there definitely has been one. However, with limited internet connection and a lack of tons of free time, I will save the spiritual journey information for a later post. just wanted you to know that I’m alive and well.”
So, at camp, we were required to post at least one blog while we were there to get in the habit of blogging and letting all of our supporters know what their money is going toward and how I am growing and reaching others in this process. That was the first draft of what I was going to post. Then that evening I went to hear a speaker talk about the realities of the sex trade industry, the horrors of HIV/AIDS across the world, and the tragedy of orphans. My heart was broken and it didn’t feel right for my one post at camp to talk about the details of camp, so instead I posted http://addieweaver.theworldrace.org/?filename=i-can-be-trained .
The next day after that post we were put into our teams. There are about sixty members on the October 2010 World Race Squad and we were broken down into smaller teams of about six. We will be traveling to each country as a squad (all 60 of us), but we will mainly be working with our team. So the last few days of camp were spent getting to know the five other individuals that are soon going to know way more about me than they would probably ever want to know. Here is my team: http://www.theworldrace.org/?tab=teams . Our team name is Hineni and I posted a blog on why we chose that http://addieweaver.theworldrace.org/?filename=hineni . So that basically sums up camp, I hope it was clear, but feel free to ask questions if you have any.
Blessings, my friends!
