Youth Conference

This past weekend we had our multi stake youth conference. Ventura hosted 400 youth to our youth conference and probably about 50 chaperons. We invited Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo to Ventura to attend a 3 day conference for youth ages 14 -18. I have been on the planning committee for the last year for this event. We asked families in our stake to house all these youth and chaperons. We started at 4:00 pm on Thursday afternoon, we had games and food at the school across the parking lot of the stake center. Morgan was asked to help run games and help kids settle in. She was in charge of a group and stayed with them through dinner. Thursday nights dinner was a Luau and then a Hawaiian themed dance. Once I got off from work I headed to the stake center to chaperon the dance and pick up the boys I would be housing for the weekend. I had 6 boys to house. Lucky for me I had Jake, Joey (my nephew) and Danny (boy from my ward).



I also had 2 boys from Goleta (Tyler and Luis) and one boy from Washington (Alex). Alex was visiting his mom for a few weeks this summer and she signed him up to go to youth conference. I felt bad for him because he didn't know anybody. He was a little odd, he liked to talk about knives and other strange things. I think he did this to impress the other boys. Jake and Danny were not impressed and quietly removed themselves to Jake's room to play guitar hero. The other boys put up with it. Everyone got along really well. Maybe I was the only one that thought he was odd, well Eddie did too.
Friday we were back up at the church at 8:30 am. Brad Wilcox was our keynote speaker on Friday morning. He is a great speaker. Very enthusiastic, very engaging. For the next 3 hours we had workshops for the youth to attend.
1) Brad Wilcox - stay in the Life boat (staying close to the gospel)
2) Zach James - Dating
3) Don (?) - FBI agent talking about integrity and Internet
4) Michelle Carr - Dr talking about health issues: energy drinks, alcohol, meth and sexually transmitted diseases
5) Scott Maddox - Missionary prep



After the workshops we had lunch and then started our massive service project. Our service project was to make quilts and pillows for an organization that is based out of LA called the "painted turtle". the painted turtle is a camp for medically compromised children. They offer a camp for kids that would not be able to go to camp because of their medical issues. This is a free camp for families to send their kids to. They have doctors and nurses on staff. They handle very serious medically compromised children. As part of the camp each child who attends receives a quilt and a turtle pillow. We had the owners of the camp come and explain what they do at the camp and then we broke into groups and stuffed and sewed 900 turtle pillows and several hundred quilts. The owner of the camp said he has never seen a group of kids like this before and couldn't believe what they accomplished in just a couple of hours.


After a long, hot service project we were ready to cool off down at the beach. We shuttled all of the kids down to the beach to play volleyball, touch football, and just hang out on shore line. We had dinner, hamburgers and hot dogs with french fries (yes our cook did french fries in the parking lot at the beach) watermelon and pasta salad. Next we were ready for our beach dance. The kids loved having a beach dance! The DJ set up on the sidewalk right next to the sand and the kids danced in the sand (talk about a work out)
Saturday morning the youth were in their Sunday best to hear a speaker who was very well known for EFY music (I only remember his name was Mike) and a testimony meeting. Youth testimony meetings are very interesting. No matter how many times you tell them and remind them it is a testimony not confession time, or I love my friends mtg, there are always a few that push the limits and tell their exaggerated stories. One kid talked about his gay friend and the abuse he had gone through. I thought they were going to have to pull the plug on him, but he ended wrapping it up in an ok manner. Then there are the kids who try to tell stories the way someone like Brad Wilcox would do and it never seems to have the effect the way are hoping for.
After the testimony meeting we sent them home with a slide show of what they had done over the last 2 days and a sack lunch for the road. I was really happy with the way the event went and thought we did a good job. Jake, Joey and I headed home, and I then took about a 4 hour nap!