Exasperated rolling of the eyes is what I got from my boys while they were picking up their t-shirts and signing in at Youth Conference last Friday night.
I had to do a little coercing to get them to attend, because I wanted them to mingle with some really nice Mormon girls since they didn't have much of an opportunity to do that in Italy.
It's nice when a mother's ulterior motives....
are backed up by Heavenly Father. The youth were assigned randomly to 8 different groups by the YM president and miraculously Trevor & Brendan ended up sitting by the exact young woman I wanted to pair them with. (Brendan sitting across from Allysa and Trevor next to Meadow)
After the "blind draw dinner" where the youth had to be creative and eat noodles with a spoon or rice with one chopstick, they divided up and went to career classes. Brendan went to the military presentations, lawyer, and doctor. Trevor to the AF representative, pilot, musician and pharmacist. We got a chuckle as a few of the Micronesian young men went to the "homemaker" class because they thought it was about building/constructing homes. Note to self for next time: remember the language barrier and give a brief description of the class content!
The next morning the Youth Conference mascot, a Gecko, took a ride with Trevor to pick up garbage. (The Theme was "Fear Not" and the t-shirt portrayed a YM eating a Gecko)
We picked up enough trash to fill the back of this truck 10 times over. We found in some of the poorer areas of the island, near the jungle, piles of trash. (Note: there is a lot of island pride and Chamorro's take care of their beautiful island, but they have areas where poorer Micronesians from the surrounding islands come to Guam and think they can just pile trash. So it has to be picked up by civic, military or youth groups until they can train the Micronesians.
I showed the youth how to reach in with a stick to roll bottles towards them so they didn't get the spiders and webs in their hair. There was a lot of screaming going on with all the lizards and bugs coming out of the trash mounds.
We also painted two bus shelters that were covered in graffiti--thought we left that all behind in Italy--wrong!
Even with the bright purple paint, it looked so much better without all the tagging.
We fed everyone a quick lunch, and then the Fear Factor games began. First they had to play midget baseball on their knees with a marshmallow as the ball and spatula as the bat.
There was a bit of sleeping grass with stickers, but they pushed through. They has to bob for apples with bugs floating in the water and push pennies through mincemeat with their noses but they all dug deep and showed no fear.
But then came the eating challenge. I prepared some awful dishes. I remembered Heidi had eaten balut, fermented duck egg with the baby duck embryo, feathers, beak and all, on her mission, so I had a Filipina sister demonstrate how to eat the duck. There was a collective groan and look of horror on everyone's faces.
Many of them were good sports and tried it, but many could not finish it.
Couldn't get me to try this slimy balut!
Even with the bright purple paint, it looked so much better without all the tagging.
We fed everyone a quick lunch, and then the Fear Factor games began. First they had to play midget baseball on their knees with a marshmallow as the ball and spatula as the bat.
There was a bit of sleeping grass with stickers, but they pushed through. They has to bob for apples with bugs floating in the water and push pennies through mincemeat with their noses but they all dug deep and showed no fear.
But then came the eating challenge. I prepared some awful dishes. I remembered Heidi had eaten balut, fermented duck egg with the baby duck embryo, feathers, beak and all, on her mission, so I had a Filipina sister demonstrate how to eat the duck. There was a collective groan and look of horror on everyone's faces.
Many of them were good sports and tried it, but many could not finish it.
Couldn't get me to try this slimy balut!
Round 2 was the seaweed sandwiches that I piled high.
Brendan plugged his nose to get it down. The other dishes consisted of snails and sardines, pickled eggplant with baby food plumes smeared over it, stinky kimchee and calamari and other nasty treats that made the youth gag. But the youth cheered each other and rose to the occasion. The funny thing was that I had some finger shaped sugar cookies that I had them dip into ketchup and even that was hard for some YW.The youth then got to go home and change for the dance and skits.
Here is Brendan (in blue shirt on left) giving Willie a pep talk before he hit the stage. A few of the local kids were so nervous, but Brendan convinced them they didn't need to fear, and they could go up and give a top notch performance.
They did and had everyone laughing.
Here is Brendan (in blue shirt on left) giving Willie a pep talk before he hit the stage. A few of the local kids were so nervous, but Brendan convinced them they didn't need to fear, and they could go up and give a top notch performance.
They did and had everyone laughing.
The youth were suspicious when we brought out these goodies. I told them they needed to have faith and believe that they were bug-free.
My boys got over one of their biggest fear of the conference and actually danced with a girl . Awww. (I didn't get a photo of Trevor but he did dance)
But the effort proved so exhausting that Trevor promptly went to the hallway and went to sleep. (In all fairness he was tired from the semi-final football game he played that afternoon-- which they won.) I came out a few times to check on him and found girls poking him trying to wake him up to come dance. A futile effort.
Brendan stayed out and did the electric slide with his homeboys and had a great time despite himself. The conference was a lot of work to plan. I had 2 District meeting each week for a month --some lasting as long as 4 hours to get it all done. The District President told me he had the District YW calling waiting for me 2 months before we moved on island. I had 2 choices--fear all the hard work and say no---or roll up my sleeves and get to work. I took Grandpa Sid's advice "Never be afraid of a little hard work."
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