By Elan Rodriguez
To start this off, this is only my first year in the YMCA Youth and Government program. Back in September of last year, me and my friends decided to sign up to participate in the Youth and Government club at our school – we chose to do media. I wanted to be part of this club because things like this have always interested me. We went on to compete at the district conference and we were able to move forward to state. After all of that, now we’re here.
We arrived at Kalahari at about 1:30 pm on Thursday and sat through the opening ceremonies. After that we were able to go to our rooms to sit back for a bit, before going to the arcade and having some fun. We got back to our rooms at around 10 pm and showered to go to bed. This morning we decided we wanted to go to the State Capital to watch some of the legislative sessions. As I was sitting in the courtroom watching and listening I was also writing notes and things that would go well in my media report. After I wrote my first report I couldn’t think of anything else that wasn’t similar to what I had already written. After some thinking I decided to just write about the experience of being here and hearing all the debating over the different bills. I listened to many different bills, some about worker safety and others about classroom safety. One of my favorite ones was about the safety of construction workers in extreme heat. Overall This was a very enjoyable experience and I am looking forward to the coming days where I will do much more.