Youth Conference

We just finished a Tri-stake Youth Conference here in the Tri-cities.  The conference was youth-planned.  What a huge undertaking.  I guess there were about 650 youth (someone said nearly 700) and each of the 32 wards was to have four adults along (I was one of the adult leaders from our ward).  It made for a huge crowd.  

The theme was "Be One."  On Thursday ("One in Fun") there was a day of games along with a humanitarian project and lunch; Friday ("One in Faith") with skits, dinner, luau, a wonderful fireside (my second favorite part of the youth conference) and a dance.  And Saturday ("One in Service") where there were 30 ward projects, a breakfast, a lunch and a testimony meeting.  Sunday was a fireside to wrap things up.  

The highlight for me was the service project day.  In our ward, we selected three projects in our boundaries and we inherited a project from another ward.  We weren't sure how many youth would come and whether the youth would work. With our bishop beforehand, we had prioritized the projects.  We planned to just work our way through the projects until our time ran out.  

As it turned out, we had a WONDERFUL bunch of kids--sixteen from around the tri-stake area--and our three ward leaders were great, too (maybe here is where I can joke that I, the 4th ward leader was great, too, ha ha!).  Here are some pictures of our service projects.

The side of the yard along the street--"swept clean."

First, at the home of an elderly ward member, we did a fine-tuning of his yard.  One leader said, "Cut down any weed you see, and it's all weeds."  :o)  The priests had already made inroads a few weeks before since we knew we did not have time to do it all the day of the Youth Conference, but we really expanded on what the priests had started.  When we were all done, I thought it looked great.  I only regretted that we'd not brought some live flowers for his flower beds.

Behind the house--lots still to do that day.

The group in front of the finished project.  

The only youth from our ward were our two ward youth leaders.  The rest of the kids were randomly assigned to our ward by some kind of lottery.  We lucked out.  Like one youth said later, "I think we had the best group."  True, that.

The "before."  
There will always be weeds to create opportunities to serve..

Then we moved to another house in the area.  Some work had been done previously on this yard and we were to take out the weeds along the periphery of the yard.

The "after."  
No weeds along the city's easement on both streets at this corner.

We completed job that in almost no time at all.

The garden plot after the brother scraped and plowed it but before the compost.

Then we moved onto the project we had inherited from another ward.  We had had a brother from our ward scrape and plow/disk up a 25'x25' garden area.  Then our youth group unloaded and spread a truck load of "compost" (made from sewage and yard clippings--P.U.)

Too bad I can't "paste" the smell of it 
and the cloud dust that was coming off it as we shoveled..

The homeowner was there with us and so happy to see all our work.  Although this was the third project of the day, it was the first and only homeowner we would see that day, unfortunately.  I think it gave the kids a lift to meet the people benefiting from our work.

Egad, a trap for wayward tumbleweeds!

Next we worked at the home of an elderly woman who lives away.  As the project progressed, I came to the realization that we were doing the project more for the neighbors' benefit, in reducing the fire danger and the unsightliness of the place, than for the homeowner.

Anyone calculate what a lighted match would do with that?

This, above, was pretty much how the whole yard looked.

Viola!  Check out the carport "after"!

Those tumble weeds were no fun to tromp down on our trailer so we could add even more weeds to our pile.

Notice those dry fox tails are gone in this area.

Most of our projects serendipitously had shade for us to work in.

The clean up crew again at the end of our projects!

We did not have time to completely finish this project but we made great headway.  In fact, we had not thought we would be able to do anything with this project at all.  As we left, the neighbor lady thanked us profusely.

Before we left the other groups to set out on our series of projects, some kids had been moved into groups who needed more people power.  We had sixteen and I suggested sending some of ours to other groups.  One of our leaders said to me, "Well, probably only half of the kids will work anyway so we should just keep everyone in our group,"  That made sense based on past experience with outdoor projects and kids.  However, I did not hear one complaint and everyone pitched in happily. Everyone was working really hard to finish everything.  There were two kids that powered out a bit toward the end but they didn't interfere with the others who were working.  I was just so thankful and amazed at how well this activity turned out.