A New Life

Discovery School is amazing.

Its that simple.

I spend my day building relationships with kids who don't know how to have good relationships. I am open and honest about how I feel about them. If they are making me uncomfortable, frustrated, or any undesirable emotion, I tell them. It is their job to make me feel better and explain why they make me feel this way. This may seem odd, but for kids who don't have any idea how to deal with their emotions and the way other people perceive them in a group setting, this is crucial.

To foster this relationship, we (myself, other group leader who I call Mr. Cashmoney, my supervisor, and my kids) live in a small village of buildings that we build completely and maintain. Imagine Lincoln logs, but at least 3 times bigger! (shout out to Zoolander)

We just finished completing the shelter I will be living in with three other young men. Its about 15ft. x 20ft. and very cozy with its slate rock flooring. This video gives a good survey of what a typical campsite looks like.


There's 14 of us all together, three staff and eleven young men. My sole purpose with the young men right now is to get a relationship with them. The best way to do this is to have some common experiences with them. More often than not, this means I spend a good bit of time on work projects with individual students. Work projects can involve digging out stumps (one of my personal favorites), wheel barreling 300lbs. of gravel at a time up and down hills a 1/4 mile each way, or sawing rounds for fire wood. This is not a comprehensive list, but it gives the basic idea. Through these work projects the students usually get triggered and begin to express some emotion, whether it be frustration from the work project, which is usually what happens, or some other emotion. It is my job then to investigate that emotion and use it to find the deeper issues with student (that's the tough part).

The usual population of students come from wealthy families with a few students from social services. More often than not, the school is an alternative to juvenile. Drugs play a big part in a lot of the students life, at least before they came here. Their home life is fairly unstable. In short, these are kids who, probably having a horrible upbringing, have made some truly bad decisions on their own part. I could list them, but that would be too long of a list.

I hope this gives a good idea what I'm doing with myself thus far. Its a difficult thing to put into words. I'm learning how to love in a different way, which is a bit scary, but proving to be well worth it. Its Sunday and that means I go back to work. Despite having made terrible decisions in their lives, these young men are amazing and have taught me so much about myself. Truly, God is Present.

I hope all is well back home!

C.T.

My trip to Baginia...

So I decided to go ahead and record the important moments of my trip to Baginia. It was an amazing trip and I hope you enjoy the highlights. It looks like next week I'll start to blog about the camp, which is absolutely amazing.

Here's the link to my youtube stuff. http://www.youtube.com/Snowsuitwarm I was going to post them all on blog, but that was going to take way to long.

Enjoy!

Promise of Updates

ok friends, this is my grand promise of almost weekly updates of what's going on in my life. I've got some sweet videos to upload from my road trip to Baginia! I just watched them and they're pretty funny...I think so at least. After listening to the videos I realize I have a bit of a lisp. oopssss.

It'll take me a minute to figure out how to upload all this junk from youtube, but I'll get there.

Whooo hooo!

Goes Baginia Kangaroos!

C.T.