River Falls High School juniors Anika Hovland and Greyson Delander told Rotary about their experiences at Camp RYLA last month. RYLA stands for Rotary Youth Leadership Awakening. Each year our Rotary club sends two high school students to the four day RYLA leadership camp at Camp St. Croix. The camp consists of a series of activities and projects that help the students discover the leadership skills within themselves.
The first exercise was to follow a rope to the end while blindfolded and to ask for help if they needed it. The trick was that the rope was actually a circle, which meant that they would never come to an end without asking for help. The lesson was to ASK FOR HELP when you need it.
The next exercise the pair described was for a blindfolded group to follow directions from one member who wasn’t blindfolded and as a team turn over a tarp that the group was standing on. This was about giving precise directions, listening to instructions and building trust. A third task was to have all team members stand on a log and then move past each other on the log. This took a lot of teamwork to avoid falling off the log.
Among the favorite activities Annika and Greyson described were just talking to other campers around a campfire at night and scaling the rock-climbing wall. They both liked the service activity of packaging meals at Feed My Starving Children.
All teams had to do a skit at the end of the camping experience. Annika’s team decided to to perform a dance.
Greyson said that one of the unexpected bonuses was that the participants got to see the green Northern Lights that came farther south than normal.
In the future, Greyson wants to join the military and then become a commercial pilot. Annika is also considering military service after graduating from high school and is also interested in becoming a commercial pilot.
The high school helps find students for Rotary by putting an announcement and the application in the parent’s newsletter. This year they had more applicants than they had available spaces for Rotary Youth Leadership Awakening.