Leader's Weekend

                This past weekend I went to a Leadership Retreat at Finbrooke Program Center, a property out near Rogersville owned by Girl Scouts of the Missouri Heartland, our local Girl Scout Council. I’ve been attending this event since 2000 and been on the planning committee for it since the 2001 event. Every year this event has a different theme which is suggested by the participants and fleshed out by the committee. Since 2012 is the 100^th anniversary of Girl Scouting the theme this year was 100 years and shining. Some of the workshops/classes at the event relate to the theme and others are on leadership, outdoors and others on crafts. It’s a pretty busy weekend filled with learning, food, hanging out with other leaders and enjoying camp without the kids being around. It really is a pretty fun weekend overall, although I swear I’m more tired after it than I am going into it sometimes with everything that has to run smoothly to make it happen for the participants. For the past few years I’ve been a Unit Leader, which is someone with camp experience that is responsible for taking care of the participants in one unit, answering their questions and keeping it running smoothly as well as making sure it is properly cleaned and closed down at the end of the weekend. This is a pretty stressful job and with everything crazy in my life I decided to not take that on this year and join a group known as the Mafia. This is a group of long time scouts and Leader’s Weekend participants that are the ones you call if you need something dealt with that’s not serious enough for the ranger to be called, or the ones he calls when he is needed in too many areas at once. Everyone in this group has more than 15 years of experience camping at Finbrooke, I personally have 20 and am one of the younger/least experienced members of the group.  We stay in a separate camping unit and are a generally pretty relaxed group. We are also responsible for setting up and running the night hike, which is a hike at 10 PM on Saturday that is typically done with minimal lighting. There are always a few interesting things set up on the trails, such as glowsticks and reflective disks and such, which make for some fun, we even typically have a few helpers in the woods making Naga noises (Nagas are their own blog post, I’ll try to fit them in before the end of the year). The hike ends in one of the camp units where we sit around a campfire and tell legends and stories about camp as well as answer any questions anyone has about camp or camping experiences we have had. It really is a fun time and I’ve helped with it for years, as I started helping set up some of the sights and such back when I was a teenager.

                I grew up out at camp, I’m on my third camp ranger and can’t believe that I’m actually not working out there this summer. I’ve been the resident camp nurse and it hit me really hard on Saturday that I won’t be living there this year. Well that’s really all I have to say about this for now, I might come back in and add some camp/LW pictures in the future, or I might write a post next week about Finbrooke in general. We shall see J