Dear Reader,
I am a horrible blogger and I apologize for that. In my defense for not posting blogs more frequently, I have been quite busy and internet at church camps is very limited, if you can believe that. I am currently at Chi Rho camp at Loch Leven in the Pacific Southwest Region. If you are an avid reader of the blog, aka my mother, then you might be thinking to yourself, “hey, wait! Isn’t this your second week at Loch Leven! Why do you get all the southern California sunshine!?” And, dear reader, you would be correct. My camp in Illinois didn’t workout and the people of Loch Leven and the Pacific Southwest Region were kind enough to let me stay another week! This week is a bit different than last week’s CYF 2. For starters, there are roughly 90 Chi Rho campers here. I would say that’s the largest difference. So, as I mark my halfway point of the summer, I have decided to spend this blog reflecting on the interesting things I’ve done.
Let’s start with Nebraska. Dear, sweet Nebraska. I met some of the nicest people during my time at Kaleo, but they made me do some strange stuff. Let’s talk about cow tanking. What is cow tanking you ask? Great question reader! Cow tanking is when you get into a large plastic cow tank that has had wood seats built in and you very slowly float down a river. I felt that I had really experienced the true Nebraska, but when we were pulled out of the river early because there was a storm coming and we all had to race back to Kaleo, that’s when I knew I had done Nebraska.
Now that I felt like a true corn husker, I moved on to Oklahoma, where the wind doesn’t sweep down the plains as much as I thought it might. You are probably thinking to yourself, what could possibly be your Oklahoma experience! You already had the tornado warnings in Nebraska! And you are right, dear reader. But during my time in good ol’ OK, I had the experience to witness a family noodlin’. What is that? Oh, it’s when you catch a catfish WITH YOUR HAND. Growing up in the desert, water is a foreign concept to me and I tend to avoid it at all costs. But after watching a family try and lure catfish out of their holes and wherever it is that catfish live, I have decided to totally swear off water forever.
Finally, we have reached my unique California experience. While it might not be unique to most Californians, it was a first for me. My first night at Loch Leven, when I was just waking from a peaceful sleep, an earthquake shook the building and my bunk. This was my first earthquake experience, so at first I thought I had dreamt it. It wasn’t until the camp manager asked the camp how we liked the earthquake this morning that I realized that was real. Now you might be thinking, Claire, what’s the big deal? California gets earthquakes all the time! And I hear you, but again, I direct you to my desert upbringing. The mountains in Albuquerque protect us from many natural phenomenons. When a tornado hit Washington, IL. my freshman year of college I remember not knowing what to do and sitting in the basement by myself for at least 20 minutes before others began to trickle down.
Being a Peace Intern has allowed me to experience things across the country that I might otherwise never have experienced and I am forever grateful that I get to say I have been cow tanking in Nebraska, I have seen noodlin’ in Oklahoma, and I lived through a California earthquake. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the summer has in store!