August Break - Part 1

The break started out with a nice trip down to Utah - just so that I could make my drive home as long as possible. We had a good time down there though. My sister took me to meet a couple of the missionaries that had served up here, we hit up Lagoon, went to Erica's bridal shower, Played with Janice's horses, and went to a mini mission reunion FHE. Overall it was a good time, minus the fact that I lost my Drivers license when I was at Lagoon! Oh yeah we also went to the mission homecoming for my missionary trainer's brother who actually served in my home mission in Edmonton, so I had met him a couple of times while he was on his mission.
Our drive home was interesting because we drove through the night switching off to sleep and got home at like 630am. Once I got home I found out that I was still able to work at EFY and that I had to be back down in Calgary in two days for training. So I caught up on my sleep, did my laundry and repacked my bags and said good bye to my family again.
EFY was an interesting experience to say the least. Sunday we got paired up with our co-counselors and planned out or week as best we could. Something strange happened that I didn't think to much of at the time but i came back from asking someone a question and my co-counselor's face was all red and he said something to me and ran off to "bed". I didn't mention anything to him the next day because I didn't want to embarrass him and thought it maybe something like indigestion from the gross KFC we had had. The next day everything went great. We met our kids and my girls were amazing. The guys were great t0o even the two who liked to act up quite a bit. I had made a mental note to talk to Steve about how to handle them for the rest of the week. I already had a sunburn by the end of the day from standing out on the corner and directing cars so overall i considered the day a great success.
The next day however, everything hit the fan! Our morning devotional went well and we were headed down to breakfast when I saw the two "trouble makers" (boys) headed in the wrong direction. So I stopped them to find out where they were going and found out that my co-counselor had gone into the hospital the night before with appendicitis. Turns out his appendix and actually burst! (this also explained his rushing off on Sunday night). So of course I was in shock and went to find out if it was true.
Long story short. The rest of the week I spent taking care of 19, 16-19 year old, kids primarily by myself. The building counselors helped out a lot and by the end of the week I had one of them was stepping in almost full time to replace Steve. Now this situation would not have been so bad if it wasn't for the two "trouble makers". I spent most of my time baby-sitting them and when I wasn't they got in trouble. Fist fights, swearing at counselors, running away from EFY, sneaking out at night.... did I miss anything.
Now the kids were not completely horrible - neither one of them were members of the church, one of their uncles had sent them to EFY for the week. but I don't think either of them knew what they were getting into. They didn't know anything about the church and they definitely did not know how many rules there were at EFY.
I did have some good experiences with them though. I spent one day teaching them the first missionary lesson and gave one of them a book of mormon. It was a bitter sweet relationship. I just like to forget the bad and think of them as the good kids they have the potential to become. They really are great kids and I enjoyed my time with them but this week was one of the hardest weeks of my life. Including my mission. I felt horrible all week because I didn't feel i gave the rest of the group the attention they deserved. Also, these two boys kind of took away from their experience. But overall I survived and I think they all felt the spirit. Which is the whole point right.