Youth Conference

A few weeks ago our high councilman called a couple dozen members of my ward out to meet with him after sacrament meeting and told us that they were trying to find young adults to help out with youth conference this year. I was not doing anything that weekend, and so I emailed the address he gave us to say I'd be willing to help. I figured it would be a good opportunity to mingle with the rest of the stake a little (because singles wards don't interact much with the other wards) and that I would be assigned to help out with an activity or two and perhaps maintain general order.

The next thing I knew I was emailed a 41-page instruction manual on the duties of youth counselors. It turns out that this was a huge, 4-stake youth conference up in Oakland County (about an hour away), with 500+ youth, and that I had signed on to essentially play the part of an EFY counselor for 2 days. To be perfectly honest, it was not quite what I was expecting, and it took some time for me to overcome my trepidation about the evening.

I cannot remember most of my own youth conferences anymore. I sort of remember dancing in the La Cañada building cultural hall, and a testimony meeting at Descanso Gardens, and a spiritually-themed carnival at the stake center, and a sleepover at some Anderson's house or other, but I don't even know what years those fell in. Even the pioneer trek my last year is vague in my memory - I remember that we were supposed to wear homemade skirts and pull handcarts and write in our journals outside our tents, and I think we had a stick pull or something. But it's all hazy in my old age, so I wasn't able to put myself in the youth's shoes beforehand.

But it turned out to be kind of fun, if exhausting. I had two other co-counselors, Abby and Brock, and we were in charge of a group of twenty 15-18 year old kids. Each group was named after some sort of spiritual attribute, and we were the Forgiveness group, so I spent a lot of the weekend yelling, "Forgiveness!" which seems kind of funny now that I look back on it. We stayed in the dorms at Oakland University (and they made me grateful for BYU's dorms, which are about five times nicer), and the counselors were mostly in charge of herding their group around from one activity or class to the next, getting their group into meals, leading group games, giving a couple devotionals, and maintaining order. Oh yeah, and we got to do "passion patrol" at the dance. I never caught any kids being inappropriately passionate - in fact, it was really funny to watch some of the slow dances with about half of the couples standing awkwardly at arms length, shuffling rigidly back and forth, and studiously not looking at each other.

And of course there was a service project. We took school buses down to Detroit to help an organization called Blight Busters clean up some houses. We spent about three hours cleaning charred and moldering books and other debris out of two burned-out houses. The local news crew came out and filmed all of us in our blue youth conference t-shirts loading up garbage bags and passing them along assembly-line (disassembly line?) style to huge dumpsters. You can see the news clip here (scroll down and click on Teen Blight Busters - it's kind of cool). It was hard work, but of all the service projects I've done this was probably one of my favorites.

Forgiveness was pretty well-behaved, although the girls and the guys didn't mingle much (and you know, this may have been for the best). And they were a good group of kids. I found myself thinking a lot about what it's like to be that age - when I was a teenager it was hard for me to understand how adults could not remember what it is like to be a teenager, but now that I'm about a decade removed from these kids (whoa...I'm not going to think too much about that) I'm realizing that life experience makes a huge difference, and why adults have such a hard time knowing what to make of teenagers. I remember this from when I was a high school teacher, too - it's a really fun age group to work with in some ways because they are almost adults, and you can relate to them in a way you can't relate even to middle school students. But in other ways, they are really not adults. This can also make them fun to work with in a different sense, but you have to remember that they don't understand life the way you do, and (most importantly) they have to get there themselves.

Overall, I think youth conference was a good experience for the kids I worked with, and I'm really glad I did it. I had some good pictures from the service project to post here, but I lost my camera. That's another story which I may tell later. Still, I did manage to steal a picture of my group off the youth conference website. There they are - don't they look great?