adventures of a typical high school student

Welcome back everyone!

This year I have joined my local Youth and Government delegation, and last weekend we had our first official event. All of the members from our delegation and two other local ones met at our YMCA and camped out on the field in tents. If you’re unfamiliar with Youth and Government, it’s a high school program through the YMCA that models the California state legislature and court system. I look forward to the weekly meetings and everyone has been so welcoming, so I thought I would share a little bit about this event.

I arrived at the YMCA at 2:00 pm with my sleeping bag, camping chair, bag of snacks, and duffle bag in tow. I didn’t bring a tent since one of my friends was bringing one for four of us to share, which was good because I don’t even think I own a tent- my family’s not very outdoorsy. We got a chance to talk to the people from other delegations, listen to some officer speeches as practice for the actual conferences, and do some speed debates (my favorite topic: M&Ms vs. Skittles) as icebreakers, and then we walked up to the nearby hiking trails and picked up trash as a mini service project.

By this time it was around 4:00, and it was time to set up our tents. My tent group struggled at first, but thanks to two of the members being Girl Scouts and one of our wonderful advisers helping out, we succeeded in putting it up. We all brought a wonderful assortment of snacks; I had a pound bag of Sour Patch Watermelon, two bags of Boom Chicka Pop, and a bag of gummy bears, plus all the candy, cookies, and chips everyone else brought. Even though it was pretty early, we started breaking in the snacks since everyone was already hungry.

It was time for slightly more formal debates, so we got numbered off into groups and did debates that had two pro and two con speakers. I thought the topics were really interesting since they related to actual bills/legal issues. We did three to five debates and then the officers from each delegation got together to teach us some cheers that we can use to show spirit at conferences in Fresno and Sacramento. After all of these little things, it was dinnertime! There was a little buffet of hot dogs, salad, and chips- the perfect barbeque.

My friends and I all went into another tent that had a lot of other people from our delegation in it. We ate more snacks, listened to music, laughed a lot, and were just hanging out. The returning members told us newbies more about what to expect at actual conferences, and it was nice that they were so open to questions. It was now pretty dark, and soon our advisers came to all of our tents to tell us it was time for delegation bonding. We walked up the steep hill to a little rec room, and we did our bonding- I can’t exactly say what it was, but it was a really amazing experience.

Once bonding was over, we had free time to go to the bathroom, get ready for bed, and hang out in our friends’ tents until we actually went to sleep. This time, everyone came in our tent since we had all the good snacks. We were honestly delirious and having the funniest time until the advisers made everyone leave around midnight. My tentmates and I changed into pj’s, got comfy, and went to bed. Our tent was actually a fairly good temperature, but it was super windy outside so none of us got the best sleep.

We woke up around 7:00 am and (almost embarrassingly) immediately started snacking again. My tentmates and I ate almost a whole box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. We didn’t actually have to get up and out of our tents until 7:30, so we stayed in our sleeping bags until then. Soon enough, our advisers came to tell us to start disassembling our tents and getting our stuff packed up. I’m proud to say we packed up pretty quickly and efficiently. We then got a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese with fruit, and did some more debating- this time a more informal style.

9:00 am rolled around, and it was time to get picked up. I’m so thankful for the advisers and everyone who put time into planning the conference and providing the opportunity for us to bond. It was definitely a one-of-a-kind experience and I’m now even more excited for our first conference in Fresno coming up in a few weeks!

-Brooke