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Did you miss me? Did you notice I was gone? Even if you didn't, I'd like to share the story of my week in the wilderness.
For people unfamiliar with LDS ways, Girls' Camp is an interesting phenomenon. So, I'll explain a bit about it and share the story of the week I spent there.
12 to 18 year-old LDS girls are part of the Young Women's organization of the church. They attend Sunday School with boys their age, but have a separate meeting on Sunday and a midweek activity in Young Women's. Each year, usually in the summer, they attend a week-long camp that is designed to be a spiritual and practical experience. The camp is run entirely by women, the Young Women's presidencies of the wards and stake (the stake level is a grouping of several wards, local congregations, in an area) as well as a team of women who are called to be camp directors and who coordinate the whole effort. Coordinating camp involves all of the set-up and organization for 200 girls and their leaders. The girls camp in groups, divided by their ward, and during the day split up into age groups and work on passing off certification requirements to advance in the 6-year program. Yearlings are the 12-year-olds, followed by Mountaineers, Inspirators and Adventurers. After completing four years of camp, the 16 and 17 year-old girls are Youth Leaders, who help teach survival skills and silly songs to the younger campers.
Girls' Camp in the Stevensville Stake is rather primitive and intense. While Young Women in Utah and other areas often camp in cabins, camp complexes, or even hotels, Montana girls camp in huge army tents on local ranches and water has to be trucked in for the week. Food is cooked on fires and showers are accomplished with buckets and sponges.
I attended camp as the assistant Mountaineer leader. Due to an interesting demographics phenomenon, the group of 13-year-olds this year was tiny - we had eight girls. During unit time, we learned about starting fires, knife safety, poisonous and edible plants, cloud formations, and other fascinating woodswoman skills. We also had the girls break up into pairs and work with one of the Youth Leaders in a 20-minute scripture study each day.
This week, of all weeks in the year, had to be the one in which temperatures hit 100 every day. There was plenty of shade in our woodsy location, but plenty of sun and plenty of horseflies and other insects of the vastly creepy variety. But our girls were troopers. They ranged from little Natasha, who had the attention span of a kitten and the voice of a banshee, to soft-spoken Hannah who silently trooped along the 5-mile hike on Thursday up a mountainside in the sweltering weather, only informing us afterwards that she had a badly swollen ankle. More than once, I mixed up the rest of the girls, whose names all started with K's and A's. Between the Ashleys and the Katies and the Katelynns and the Kims and the Annies and the Kelsies I found myself more than a little frustrated with the naming trends of the early 90s.
I was staying in Stake camp, with the "grown ups," which was a new experience for me. More than once I spent an hour or two of my free time with my little sister in Stevensville First Ward's camp, in hours of endless hair braiding. The First Ward Braidy Bunch was a delightful group of girls and leaders ranging in age from 12 to 67 who could always find a common topic of conversation. Girls' Camp leaders are remarkable people - They're grown women with real lives and responsibilities who nevertheless find it in them to plan meals for 20 girls for a week, cook said meals on wood they themselves had to wake up and split, and still find the energy to dress in hula shirts and jester hats and perform all the motions to "The Princess Pat" in front of 200 similarly crazy grown women and teenage girls.
The most remarkable aspect of Girls' Camp is the amazing bonding that happens among girls from diverse backgrounds. In the evenings, the girls attend firesides in which guest speakers present spiritual messages and pass out kitschy items to hang as trophies on the girls'"boondoggle" necklaces. Most are accompanied by testimony meetings, in which girls, leaders and guests alike are given time to stand and speak of the things they know to be true. Laughter and tears abound and everyone has something different to offer.
I grew close to old friends this week. I stayed in a camp with some of the same adult leaders I had as a girl, this time as their peers. They served as examples to me then, and reassurance to me now that I can be a grown woman and still secretly enjoy wacky hats and songs with actions like "The Ladies of the Harem."
I made new friends this week. I was privileged to get to know Krista, a 16-year-old Youth Leader in my group who isn't LDS but came to camp with a friend. She was our most entusiastic and well-prepared leader and was a great example to the girls. She had a constant stream of questions on religion for my assistants and I and every spare moment was reading her scriptures. I met Kelsie, a 13-year-old with small ponytails all over her head who taught us a game called "Get up and ride that big fat pony" and was at my heels all week, hugging me and chattering my ear off. I got invited to Katie's 13th birthday party next week at her home 45 miles away, and have every intention of going. I talked with hours with Jeanette, a ward leader who is 25 and newly married and lives on her in-laws' dairy farm. She first decided she loved her husband when he was the only person in Stevensville she'd ever met who liked sushi. She braided my hair in a huge spiral around my head and we stayed up late talking about life and love and foreign films.
Most importantly, I grew closer to my sisters. I had to give a fireside talk to 13-year-olds on "Love, the higher law," and when scriptural passages were apparently too much for their attention spans, we told real-life stories on what it means to love each other and how loving those who we'd like to call our enemies has improved our lives. I discovered with them and with my fellow leaders that sisterhood is a beautiful thing and that God has us here together for a purpose. I got to see Love in action. I watched 15-year-olds in Abercrombie t-shirts clean porta-potties while singing camp songs and girls staying up late and writing anonymous notes to those they admired.
It may make excellent documentary fodder someday as an example of how truly crazy Mormon folks can be, but Girls' Camp is one of my favorite places in the world and one of the best occasions for witnessing true Christlike love and compassion that I have ever experienced.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Yeah, I'm with PSI -- I think I actually saw your name more often while you were gone than I do when you're here.
Posts: 6213 | Registered: May 2001
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I'm glad you had such an awesome experience! (I was an assistant leader for Girls' Camp back in 2001. It was interesting *shudders*. Let's just say that being deprived of a shower or any way to get clean for a week has a negative effect on my personality. Or maybe it was the sleep deprivation (kids running around playing pranks until 2 am; had to be up by 7). Or the fact that we spent most of our time either cooking meals or cleaning up after them. Or maybe it was 30 screaming 12-year-olds from six different wards, all of whom look and dress alike (so I couldn't remember who was who), and all of whom were terrified of spiders.) Posts: 1512 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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Yeah, Yozhik - the pranks can get out of hand. Our stake fortunately has a very strict no-pranking policy and the girls' energy tends to be diverted to other sneaky adventures like leaving candy all over someone's camp or plastering the biffies with inspirational quotes.
We had a giant water fight on Friday - the camp director's husband brought up a truck with 4,000 gallons of irrigation water and we had a designated war zone from which no one emerged without at least one bucket being emptied on her head. I thought that was a brilliant idea for an aggression outlet.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Welcome home darling, it's a welcome relief to everyone here who had to hear about me missing you, and a welcome relief to me for having you back finally.
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I knew you were gone even before Hobbes posted a couple times . . .
I'm glad you had such a great time. I am curious about one thing, though. How does one wake up wood?
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I had to laugh at your post. I grew up in Virginia and if we had camped by ward, I would have been camping by myself. Another ward only had 2 or 3 girls go each year, so our stake camped by age. We also camped in tents. Eight girls was the most we ever had in one age group.
Posts: 188 | Registered: Aug 2003
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I went in Houston, and the younger girls camped by ward, but the fourth years were all together, and we had the extra adventures and the parts of the Indians in the last night's dramatics. Horribly unPC of course, and that's why they quit doing it, but we had a grand time. I still have my props and costume.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Yeah Kat - my mom was a camp leader in the Houston area when I was a baby and apparently there was a tradition of picking one girl to be the "Liahona," a fictional indian princess who was more fair than the others because she had white skin. My mom was a little shocked that this was all OK and sure enough, a couple years later, the word came from the Church that this not-just-a-little-bit-racist tradition would be no more. Crazy, huh?
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Annie, that was my camp!!!!! Seriously! I think I was one of the last or so years that they still did that. Oh, it was HORRIBLY unPC, and I had no idea at the time. Mostly I was annoyed that yet another mini-society I was in found the need to crown a princess, and those ignorant idiots hadn't figured out I was the best there was, so it was another sad confirmation of the essential misguidedness of the world.
I swear, it was more than a couple of years later, but I think it was while I was still in high school that they finally were ordered to quit.
Wow. Small world. Being a fourth year was a blast, though.
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