Guess who's back? Back again! Jesse's back! Tell a friend!

Whoo Hoo! It's terrible! I feel so sad! I'm back from the FDTP. Yes I needed to get back for alot of different reasons, but it still just feels bad to leave all my friends behind. Now i'm not gonna fart around with my own words about the camp. Let me tell you just what it was all about in the words of the JT Board.

FDTP 2007 for North America/Mexico/Central America

Creel,Chihuahua,Mexico
July 16th to August 15th

Who was there? 56 Attendees (36 girls/ 20 boys) 22 Staff

75 Classes, Workshops, and Study Times (note from Jesse: At 1 and a half hours for each class that translates into 112 and a half hours of classes which were mostly word based)

30 Evening activities, Game nights, Dance nights, ect.

2 hours of sports every day from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM

3 Excursions (including a sleep in and a full day off) to:
Divisadero Copper Canyon View (The Copper Canyon in Creel is 4 times larger than the Grand Canyon, I'll put a picture up);
Valley of the Monks (where we did rappelling and Rock Climbing, I'll talk more about that later);
Hot springs (The water was very warm and there were some awsome rocks to climb, although not with harnesses so it wasn't technically allowed);
Cuzarare Waterfall (Don't know the exact details but it was like 100-200 feet high, i'll put pictures of this up also).

Other points: It rained almost every day, and we had to wash our clothes by hand.

Now I'll go into more personal details about the FDTP and if you stay long enough to read the entire post you'll be treated to some pictures!! YAY!

Ok well for starters this was my first time in Mexico. About 20 teens from the states drove to the border in the Wordstock bus and spent the night in a campground on the American side. I was part of this group. The next day we crossed the border in a motor home, which we had also taken, and the group seperated. Half of us drove to Creel in the motorhome (I was with that group) and the other half went on a bus.
As I said before it rained almost every day there. Other than that the weather was really nice. It was cool in the mornings and evenings, warm/hot in the afternoons and because of the altitude there wern't alot of annoying bugs or anything. By the way the altitude was 7500 feet about sea level, just incase you didn't know.
My team consisted of 8 people who some of you probably know.
Peter Story (Team Shepherd)
Phil (from Guad; He had to leave halfway through the camp)
Phil Edson
Mike Paone
Nico (Clara's younger brother)
Eric
Mark
Me

I can hardly explain most of it so i'm only talking about some of my more favorite points. One of which was the rock climbing. (Editors note: If your name is David Paone or Benjamin Bruni you may be highly interested in these next few paragraphs)

Rock climbing was on the agenda every day for get out, but quickly died down as not too many people had the guts or the desire to climb every day.
Out of the 56 attendee's I was one of the maybe 3 or 4 enthusiasts. I didn't go every single day but I went enough and did enough to make a name for myself.
The rocks we were climbing wern't very high, but since I have never climbed on actual rocks before and with all the proper gear it was still definetly exciting. I learned all the terminology, learned how to climb properly, and learned how to lead climb.
There were about 5 different climbing courses and 1 bouldering course. They ranged in difficulty and we each started on easy ones. I quickly found that for some reason I was better at this sport than most, as I could climb up and come back down in the time that most people had only gotten halfway. I didn't find it hard, although sometimes coming down was scary. The reason for this was because in order to come down you have a person (called a belayer) who lets you down. It's not dangerous but if the belayer spaces out and lets go of the rope then you go falling down (this happend to me on one occasion).
The first day I went climbing I dislodged a rock and nearly fell because of it. The rock was about a foot wide and almost hit my belayer and a few other people below. From that point on I started playing it a bit more safe and going slower. After a while I got better at it and I did every climb a few times. Only a handful of people made it up the hardest climb, thankfully I was one of those few.
Once we started getting better at it and less people started coming our instructor let us try out lead climbing. This is where you go and set the rope up. The danger in this is that if you fall, instead of only falling a few inches before you get stopped by the rope, you fall several meters to the last place you've clipped in.
I started out by lead climbing the easiest one and found it to be pretty easy. I continued on and finally I was challenged to lead climb the hardest one. (Nobody else except the instructor had lead climbed the hardest one. One of the staff had tried but fallen and the instructor had to finish the climb)
Although the instructor (Tony) assured me that I would probably fall, I told him I'd like to give it a try anyway. I did and by the grace of god I made it all the way up, hooked up the rope, and didn't fall. I didn't fall a single time on any climb, thank you Lord. Afterwards I went back up a second time and took the rope down. I have some pictures of this I'm gonna put up.

There was also a Volleyball tournament which I entered. My team ranked 2nd place (we were 1 point shy of first place). Other than that there were the usual sports. I would write more but I still wanna upload pictures and it's super late, so I'm going to sign off now. Love you all, hope to hear from you soon!

GAH!!! I'm sorry, I'm going to save this post and post it later. I just realized that my CD of pictures is actually a DVD and this computer has a CD drive and not a DVD drive so it can't read my CD.

(Disclaimer) After about a week of this being a draft and me looking for a computer with a DVD drive, and time to post, I've come up empty handed. So no pics. Sorry. Here's the post tho.