Planning

As everything around camp begins to speed up, we are planning out various work days and schedule deadlines for different tasks that need to be accomplished before summer arrives. In my previous posts, I have discussed the hiring of summer staff and the creation of a staff manual. Well I am happy to say that our staff is fully hired and the manual is complete. YEAH! Now it is time to schedule all of the training that those staff members will do once they arrive on the 24th of May. It is difficult to schedule this training time because not only do we want to train them around the camp and promote good teamwork, we also want to make sure that all of the work projects are done before camp starts. So it is hard to schedule training because we might have a lot of work projects still left to accomplish when they arrive and that could takeaway from our team building and training time.

I must say that I did have a very scary moment this past Friday when we were filming one of the camp rules videos. One of the camp themes is focused on Ninjas so I was "fighting" with another staff member in the background of the video and once we began to film the actual take after rehearsing is when I injured myself. There was one section where I am being "tossed" out of the screen but when I landed on the ground I hit my head on the one part of the field where there is NO grass. But instead of just stopping all of the video shooting because my head was in so much pain, I continued the fighting action and finished the video. Afterwards, all I could think about was Liam Neeson's wife who hit her head skiing but felt fine after the fall but two days later she died at the hospital. As of now, everything is okay with my head and I am grateful that I am not severely injured, but I am glad that I was able to learn a lot about sacrifice which is extremely important in this ministry. I hope to look back on that experience during this summer and just laugh because of how funny the video is.

Speeding Up!

Summer is quickly approaching and our staff is realizing that we have a lot of outdoor work left to do in order to adequately prepare for everything that we want to do this summer. It has been frustrating for me at times knowing that we are this far behind and our team spends more time talking about the same stuff over and over instead of getting out there and doing it. I'm a DO-er by nature not a talker, so I want to get out and get stuff done before there is no time left and our program suffers because of it. I want to be involved in the creative thinking process and the communication about what still needs to be accomplished before summer and I must be flexible and patient with my team because they are the pros not me and I need to trust their judgement and go along helping whenenver and wherever I can.

It has finally been warming up here in Prescott again after all the snow and cold wind that we've had lately. So now it's time to start getting out and active again with mountain biking and hiking around the Thumb Butte area, which will be amazing! I hope everyone else is having a great time with their internships too!

Lack of Sleep

In order to have an internship, complete school work, have some what of a social life, and take a vacation, you must deprive yourself of sleep so that you can get everything done. During the last 7 days I was able to experience a break from all of the hectic work that I've been doing and kind of relax a bit; however, of course I did have those silly midterms and assignments that were given over spring break....weird. But anyway it's back to work at UCYC and it's busier then ever. Things are going to continue to get busy from here til the end of August because of the planning and projects that we are doing in order to get ready for summer. Currently, I am still working on filling summer staff positions and finalizing our staff manual. It has been very difficult to try and build the desired relationships with our incoming summer staff because we are limited in our interaction with them by only being able to conduct phone interviews and corresponde through email; however, it is very important for us to be involved in these people's lives in order to make them feel more comfortable about working here and engaging with all of the youth that will be visiting our facility. Being able to interact with all of these new summer staffers gives me a feeling of self-confidence because I am able to engage with them on both professional and personal levels that allows for the best relationship possible and I am involved in the process that brings them to camp which is amazing. I look forward to the day when I am able to put a name with a face and work with these gifted individuals.

Interviewing

Ok so the new experience this week was taking part in the interview process for our camp summer staff. It was interesting to see how we go about the process in hiring someone, because oddly enough I was a candidate for the same position a few summers ago. Also, it was exciting to be on the other end of an interview and being the one that asked the questions and not trying to answer them. Because summer is approaching faster and faster we crammed 5 phone interviews into about a 2 and a half hour span. It was really cool to listen to the responses of people and for us to realize YES those people are going to fit in well or well we're not too sure about that person. Since I have been given the responsibility of scheduling people to staff our rock wall, I also was given the opportunity to interview and train a new team member which was an awesome experience.