EFY

A couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to go to EFY at the University of Utah as a counselor. It was AWESOME!!! I went to EFY twice when I was the age to go and was really sad when I couldn't go anymore because I was paying for my trip to Central America instead. But the EFY office called me up and asked me to be a counselor! It was really cool to actually be paid to go to EFY--sure, it's more work than just going as a regular person, but you still get the amazing experience! The theme this year is "Be Thou An Example" and the session director was Brad Wilcox. I believe he was actually the session director for one of the years I went as a participant, but I'll have to look that up to be sure. He is such an amazing speaker and SO funny!!! There were three teachers for the various classes (which I thought was a little weird because when I went to EFY we had twelve or something--although the BYU sessions are a lot bigger than the U of U sessions) Brother Diamond, Brother Smith, and Sister Welch. They were really good! I loved their classes when I was able to go. Plus, Brother Diamond was from England so he had a cool accent :). I had twelve girls in my group and there were two other groups in my company--one other group of ten girls and one group of 16 boys. My co-counselors were Matt and Amelia and they were so much fun! Amelia was actually a girl I went to high school with! One sad thing about Matt though was that on Tuesday (which also happened to be his birthday) he got sick and had to be sent home. Which is sad enough on its own but that also meant that me and Amelia had to control all three groups without too much help (although one of the building counselors took over the boys' devotionals so we didn't have to worry about that). But one major problem came on game night. Our group was meeting after dinner to walk down to the institute building but three boys weren't coming. And, being girls, me and Amelia couldn't go into their dorms to get them out. We had to track down a guy counselor to go in to get them and, begrudgingly, they came out. But then on the way down they started running away from the group to go back to their rooms and I had to chase them down and stop them. Then, when we were at the institute building, we discovered they were gone again. We had like half of the coordinators/building counsellors trying to find them and eventually they showed up. But aside from that we didn't really have any problems--even those boys were really good most of the time, not to mention funny. Also, one of my girls had a birthday while we were there--Baylee--that was fun. She's so cute! And I know this is random, but it's one of the things that sticks out the most to me--the dances were SO hot! It's really quite disgusting if you stop and think about it because not only was it hot, it was humid! And just where do you think that humidity was coming from? Answer: the massive amounts of sweat coming off everyone in the gym which consequently had no air circulation whatsoever. But it was still fun--although I was still glad when I had dance duty which meant that I got to go and guard the exits for the building and get out of the stifling, disgusting heat. I'll try to remember to upload a picture of my group, but I haven't put it on my computer yet