Hello Everyone!
Thank you for your patience in my silence, and thank you for your prayers for my health. I was sick for just under 3 weeks after returning home from training camp. It was pretty miserable. I’m now back on my feet though and ready to give you some details on training camp 🙂
But before I do that, I would like to take a moment to truly and deeply thank all those who gave financially to my mission with Jesus. I never had a doubt that the Father would provide, but I had no idea He would use all of you to fund me so quickly and so generously. It was so special and humbling to watch as the money came in.
If anyone is still interested in donating money, there have been a lot of out of pocket expenses I have had in preparation for the trip, including getting all the gear I need. If you’re interested in helping me with that, please contact me directly.
Now, here are ten things about training camp!
1. I ate a cricket…for those of you who know my deep fear of insects, this was a big thing for me… I never thought I would do something like that.
2. This is my squad (L squad!) and our leaders. We have 24 people on our squad. We will all be traveling from country to country together!
3. This is my team. This is the group of people who I will travel with when we get to each country. My team will change throughout the race a few times. There are 4 teams of 6 in our squad.
(Left to Right) Back Row: Catie Collins Smith, Brandon Minner, Ashton Mueller
Front Row: Morgan Feldt, Rachel Cavender (me), Rob Ames IV
4. We camped, we took bucket showers, and we used porta potties the whole 10 days.
5. At the end of training camp, we finished squad wars between the 5 squads that were at camp (squad wars started before we even arrived at camp). Let’s just say our squad did not win, but we definitely had the most fun! And by the end we moved from 5th to 3rd place! L SQUAD (orange squad)!!
6. The staff at Adventures in Missions is so incredibly Spirit-led. Because of that, I encountered a very deep Spirit-led life while there. (Another blog coming on this topic)
7. Georgia is HOT. I (and probably everyone else) was in a perpetual state of sweating the entire 10 days.
8. During camp, we went through many we field scenarios. These are things that could happen while we are on the race, so the World Race staff gave us some early exposure in order to prepare us. The 3 biggest ones to me were: 1. When we slept in a mock airport for a night, 2. When half of the squad lost their luggage for 24 hours so we had share everything with each other, 3. When we spent an hour at a mock foreign marketplace.
9. Each day at training camp was a different “theme”. Most of them were different countries. For each theme, there were cultural rules we had to follow and the food we ate that day followed the theme. The themes were Asia day, Africa day (my favorite!), Latin America day, Eastern Europe day, India day, Travel day, Adventure day (when I ate the cricket), and Women/Men day (we split up).
10. We found out that our squad is not quite a traditional squad. I mentioned in an earlier blog that I had applied for the Expedition route but did not get accepted. Well there are other types of routes (squads) too. Ours is called a Hybrid route and is similar to the Expedition route, so our squads did a lot of training together. The main difference is that we will not always have ministry hosts. Some months we will simply follow the Spirit’s leading on where to go and what to do, as well as we will have some freedom to pursue some of our passions in ministry.
