by Juliana Murris

Created on: July 28, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

I've only taken a few camping trips, most of them being with my parents and friends. Of course there was summer camp too, which is probably the most benign camping you can take part in. This time was different though. At our church, around October, we learned about a Mission Trip we could go on in July to southern Tennessee. It sounded like fun, volunteering up in the mountains and working with the community.

July came by fast. On July 13, at 4 in the morning, we left for Copperhill Tennessee. We had to face a sixteen hour drive from Michigan all the way down south. All 35 of us traveled in three church vans, cramped and crowded the whole way. My mother's words rang in my head the whole way. "You can turn back from this at any time before you leave, honey." And that's what I thought, that I should have turned back.

On the way down, we laughed and joked with the other people in our van. A couple of us, including me, had done a little research on the internet to find out what cabin life was like. It seemed to ritzy, air-conditioned cabins with kitchens and built-in bathrooms. However, when we arrived, that was not the case. Apparently we had looked up the wrong ranch only to find out that the cabins were nothing but wood and mattresses.

That night, we all fell asleep around 11 pm, and had to wake up at a brutal 6:30 am. After breakfast was our first mission, environmental work. We all got in the church vans again to drive about an hour and a half up the mountains to find the Cherokee National Forest. The guides gave us two tools to clear and make trails, a "swing blade", which was used for clearing the small stuff, and the "lobbers" which were like big scissors used to get rid of the big stuff like small trees and branches. It was dirty work. One of our chaperones stepped on a wasp nest and got chased by bees, several of us got ticks on our bodies, and a couple of us neared decapitation from the swing blades.

The next day we did community work. We went to a place called "IOI" which stood for "Industrial Opportunities Inc." where mentally challenged people went to school and also had jobs. We basically kept them company, just because they liked it. Everyone had so much fun there. We had an arm wrestling match with a student named Richard, danced to "Happy Birthday" and sang to another worked named Isaac. We also joined them for lunch. At the end of our day, they gave us suspenders that they had made that day. Before we left, we gave out hugs to everyone that we had

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