Here's my journal entry for the day:
We got up the next morning, and instructions were in our
Liahona! It was basically a schedule for
the day. They gave us ham and cheese
bagels that morning that tasted pretty good.
The “baby” that we’d carried all day Wednesday “died” and we had to bury
her. They’d named her Abish and everyone
took turns carrying her during the trek.
She was heavy—we made her about 10 pounds—filling her with sand. Our group got tired of carrying her, but it
did mean that you got a break from pulling if you were carrying her, so people
wanted to rotate that. I carried her a
lot and she WAS heavy! I ended up just
putting her on my shoulder rotating shoulders, because she got so heavy! As we had the burial ceremony, we had the
chance to talk about death and its part in the Plan of Salvation. We read several scriptures out of the Book of
Mormon (we’ve been doing this the entire time where we get a list of scriptures
to talk about and mark.) and discussed
the miracle of the Resurrection and that Christ has overcome death and that we
will all be able to be resurrected and receive a perfect body someday. It was a really neat and spiritual
conversation with our family. Then we
loaded up and trekked AGAIN! This day’s
trek wasn’t as long, but this is where our family fell apart a bit. Most of them were great, but Charity kind of
had a meltdown. Thursday was not a good
day for her! She had a bad attitude and
was being mean and ornery y with ALL the members of our family—telling then
they weren’t pulling hard enough, etc.
She was even being rude to the adults!
(Us and other leaders!) This
caused some problems in the group and Whitney and Sarah approached me, because
they didn’t know what to do about it. I
told them to just be patient with her, and that she was just really tired and
that it would probably get better. It
did. She was still hard to be around for
the entire time, but she got a little easier to deal with. We finally made it to our next camp around
noon. This was main camp and where we’d
stay for the rest of Trek. This was
called the land of Zarahemla. As we
entered camp there was King Benjamin’s tower—and it was tall. We were instructed to set up our tents facing
this tower. The tents were another
story! Ours was too big, so we couldn’t
get it to hold up, so we just gave up after about an hour of trying to make it
work and just laid tarps out—we’d sleep out under the stars the entire time and
for all 3 nights! Keith set up a few
tarps around trees so the girls would have a changing area—which was really
nice. We got our stove and camp stuff
set up, and then we had lunch. Nothing
too exciting—rolls, a watermelon, some apples, beef jerky and red vines for
dessert. We enjoyed sitting as a family
on our tarp and eating together, though.
The rest of the afternoon was spent doing team work type activities,
where we rotated around the different stations.
One that really stood out to me was the Prison Break game. We explained the game but as the Emma and Abba, we were instructed to let them come up with the solutions and figure it out on their own, so we did. Our big brother, Keith spearheaded this activity. It was a game where you had to get all the members of your team over the rope tied about 5 feet tall between 2 trees without touching the rope, and because you're breaking out of prison, you have to do it without making any noise, so you couldn't talk. Keith instructed them on how to do it, and they had to try again several times, because if someone touched the rope, you had to start all over again. On about our 3rd or 4th try, they managed to get everyone over the rope except for Keith and they couldn't figure out how to get him over, so he motioned to them to just run and leave him there! He would sacrifice himself for the good of the others. Well, according to the rules of the game, everyone has to get over the rope, so they ended up figuring out a way to get him over. Afterward, when we were processing with the kids and drawing gospel parallels, the kids drew the parallel that Keith, as our family's big brother, sacrificed for the rest of the group so they could be saved from the prison and they likened that to our Big Brother, the Savior, who gave the greatest sacrifice and atoned for each of us so that we could be eternally saved. It was one of the most spiritual moments of all of Trek for our family-- to make that connection and draw that gospel application! It was a tender moment, as Keith got super emotional and bore his testimony to the kids. He did this a lot on trek and the kids from this moment on were bonded with him. They loved him so much! It was a really neat experience! (Just like we love the Savior and are bonded with Him as we realize what He did for us!) We made dinner together as a family and Bill asked Charity if she would like to be in charge of the cooking for our family. She was super excited to do this and took it on! she was great as she instructed everyone on what to do. She was having a super rough day, and this was just the things to get her involved and focused! I was glad to see that it was a good and positive thing for her! Dinner tasted so good--beef stew! Yum! After diner was the skit night--our skit was the first one! We did the Primary Hello Song with the lyrics changed to "Trek Style" and we held up signs with the new words. We did it through once, and then had all the kids (200+) join us when we did it the second time. They really got into it! It was a cute song! We did it with the Sandovals and Eliasons. The skits and entertainment were lots of fun! There were some really funny skits! WE went back to our camps and had our dessert of fry bread, which tasted more like fried pretzels. The kids all wanted to turn in early that night for which I was super grateful! I slept really well that night considering the hard ground I was sleeping on. It was the warmest of the 3 nights, too. The first night I almost froze and the last night I was pretty cold too!
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