Wow. Honestly, that’s all I can say. I can’t believe we’ve only been in Gainesville for a week and a half – it feels like a month has passed. With a little under 14 weeks to go until I’m home for Christmas, I can’t wait to see what God has in store for the rest of my time here.
I’ll start with the question I’ve been getting the most – what have we been doing here? Here’s a little rundown of the daily schedule during the week 🙂
8:00am – breakfast
I usually wake up around 7:00 to take my time getting ready and fully waking up. This involves walking up from our campsite to the sinks and porta potties (gotta love them!), brushing my teeth and washing my face, then heading back down to the campsite to get dressed and try to do something with my hair. I usually give up and throw it up in a messy bun, cause what else do you do with no mirror??
9:00am – devotional
Each day after breakfast we do a little devo. What this looks like varies on who is leading it. We’ve meditated on the Word, rewrote the section we read, just read a few chapters and took notes, had a group discussion, and a few other things. My personal favorite has been taking the chapter and putting it in my own words to help process what is being said.
10:00am – lesson & worship
After devo, we get to go inside (!!!) to worship and have a lesson. We had two amazing worship leaders for the first week, but now it’ll be up to us to lead worship. This won’t be a problem because our squad has been blessed with incredible talent when it comes to singing and playing various instruments. Like wow. After about an hour of worship we have a lesson. Our lessons are different each day, but a few topics we’ve covered have been how to be the church, physical and spiritual boundaries, and honor.
12:30pm – lunch
Next we have lunch. I’ll be honest, I was really worried about what the food would be like. But we have been blessed with some amazing kitchen staff. They make meals for the whole campus (around 150 racers and leaders) and they crush it!! We’ve had pasta, lots of chicken, beans and rice, salad, walking tacos, burritos, and lots of other stuff. The portions are a bit small so the vending machines here have been getting lots of use, but we are all so thankful for the familiar food we’ve been getting.
1:30pm – rotations and free time
After lunch, we start our rotations. These include squad time, exercise, cleaning, laundry, and showers. These rotate by squad, so we do laundry once a week, exercise and cleaning twice a week, and the others vary. We get to shower every day or every other day, but sometimes they aren’t scheduled during this time.
Once we finish our rotation for the day, we have free time. During this time I’ll go for a run, journal, or take a nap if I’m needing some rest time. Other times our cohort will play volleyball, soccer, card games, or pretty much anything else. We definitely find ways to have fun and stay busy.
5:30pm – dinner
Gotta love dinner! Like I said before, we’ve been blessed and get some pretty awesome meals.
6:30pm – team time
This time also varies. We’ll play games in our teams, have discussions, give each other feedback on the week, or just debrief on what’s been going on.
10:00pm – lights out
Team time kinda just goes until it’s done. Afterwards, we have free time until it’s time for bed. My team has been sharing our testimonies this week, so we usually finish that late and go right to bed. We have neighbors, so at 10:00pm we must be in our tents (or hammocks) and be relatively quiet. This is usually when I journal, do my devo, and maybe watch a show if I don’t immediately collapse into bed. Sleeping in a tent isn’t that bad when you’re exhausted at the end of each day.
So that’s what each day generally looks like! We have Sabbath on the weekends, cleaning, and team church, but other than that we pretty much have freedom to do what we want on campus. Starting next week, we’ll also do Fundraising Friday’s, but I’m not sure what those will look like.
Another question I’ve been getting a lot is what showers, bathrooms, and laundry looks like. Let’s just say this has been the toughest part to get used to. Everyday or every other day, we take bucket showers. We have 20 minutes and an ice cold 5-gallon bucket of water. It’s a fun time, especially when you’re scheduled at 6am or 9:45pm. In the Georgia heat, the showers are actually pretty refreshing. But on days like today when it’s cold and rainy, I don’t think it will be too pleasant. AIM is building showers for us when it starts to really cool down, so we’ll have to wait and see what those are like.
Our bathrooms for these 3-4 months are porta potties. Each squad has two porta potties spread around campus, and then there are two porta potties for all four squads to use. I’ll just let you imagine what those are like with 25-40 racers per squad. They’re emptied twice a week, but that’s not nearly as often as you’d think. Thanks to the app Poop Map, we’re making the best of the situation.
For laundry, we’re taking it back to the basics – hand washing our clothes once a week. We had our first experience with that on Thursday, and it didn’t go too well. I’ll definitely be wearing the same clothes until I get complaints this week, because I’d like to wash as little clothes as possible. Oh, and clothes take wayy longer to air dry than you’d think. Especially with this humidity.
If anyone is still reading, wow you’re a trooper. As I’m writing this all out, I’m surprised by how busy we’ve been. It’s definitely a lot to get used to.
One last thing I want to throw in is how we’re doing with Covid. AIM has been handling everything perfectly, and we’re doing great. All the squads are kept separate, and if we somehow come within six feet of someone on another squad, we have masks to wear. Within our squad, we have six teams – two guy teams and four girls. Our teams are grouped in cohorts, and for the first two weeks we won’t be in close contact with anyone in the other cohort. My team is with the two guy teams, and then the other three girl teams are together. We are at a separate campsite than the other cohort, and we eat at separate tables. You already know there’s gonna be a slow motion run to each other and a huge hug when we can combine with the other girls.
I think that’s it! There’s a little look into life on the AIM campus! I’m absolutely loving it so far, especially all of the time out in nature. We don’t have our phones during the day, and that detox has been great. We have so much time devoted to worshipping, diving into the Word, and just spending time with the Lord. This is where I’m supposed to be, and I thank the Lord each day for bringing me here.
Thank you guys again for the unwavering support, and I already can’t wait to give everyone huge hugs when I’m home for Christmas!
With love,
Brooklyn
