CEF Camp - Ben's Story

This is the story of my two weeks of training camp.

Day 1: My carpool arrived at the camp-grounds; there were several buildings to sleep in and one for eating and teaching our classes. I went to the main building to turn in my money, medical form and permission slip and found about 40 bags sitting in a row with name tags on them... perfectly organized in alphabetical order, meaning mine would be somewhere in the front. There were two bags, one with my supplies, and one with my books and paperwork. I took mine and turned in all my stuff, then rode with Nate on the 100 meter drive up to our dorms. The dorms were in a U-shape and the boys had the middle of the U, while the girls had the left side(there was no one on the right). I lugged my back pack in the room and found a nice bunk, it was a top bunk, I like top bunks. Suddenly I looked at the bunk underneath me and.... JAY!!! Jay's awesome, however, I knew that I wouldn't be getting much of the little sleeping time I already had. Everyone put their belongings on their beds and went back to the main building (I called it the dining hall since that was my favorite part about it), the leaders introduced themselves and briefed us on how things would be run. After about an hour of explaining, they told us to eat our dinners that we had packed. I opened my pack and... SOBE!!! The best brand of drink ever!! I love my mother! The bottle proved useful for re-using as a water bottle, and attitude adjusting (it's made of glass so it takes only one or two swings). Not much else happened that day so I'll skip straight to bedtime. Everyone in my room was fighting over the two showers we had. I myself prefer to shower in the mornings, so I was safe enough. We went to bed and slept peacefully... unaware of the weeks to follow...

Day 2: We began the real challenge... We were supposed to wake up at 6:00, and be at the main building by 7:00. Some people were horrified by this wake up time, others (Christoffer) were thinking, "Yay! I get to sleep in!". One thing that several of us did, was to get up at 5:30 to run a mile every morning. At first, we had about 10 people running every morning, but that slowly decreased to about 3. After our refreshing run (yea, right), we showered and went to the main building to eat breakfast. They had some good food at CEF. I ate better there than I do at my own house. The first morning we had pancakes, nothing too special, but still pretty good. After we ate, Mr. Dekle, explained how everything would be run at this camp, and told us the schedule. First, we had this thing called Cohorts where we were split into groups and our Cohorts have a Bible study and discussion about the day. Cohorts meet after dinner but they wanted us to know all our members first. My group had Matt, Gabe, Gab (they took the E out of Gabs name so he wouldn't be mixed up with the other Gabe) and myself. Our leader was Sean, he's a cool guy, and a really good leader too. After we got to know our Cohorts, we went back into the main room and had a 3 hour class about how to teach kids. Then we had lunch (corn chowder with grilled cheese!) and more classes. We then had mandatory fun, which is an hour and a half of games and then ate dinner (shepherds pie!). We sang worship songs and then went to our dorms. Curfew was at 10:00, and it was 9:00, so everyone hung out for a while. We all slowly, one by one, went to bed. There was no place to put my stuff, Jay took the space under the bed and the foot of the bed was taken, and the bed next to me was filled with stuff also. The only place I could put my stuff was on my bed, more pillows for me :-/. We all fell asleep around 11:00 (I did anyway) and got ready for the next day.