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Surviving the heat in Washington, D.C.

Surviving the heat in Washington, D.C. Surviving the heat in Washington, D.C.

By Elliott Myszka Edgar FFA

The Washington Leadership Conference (WLC) is a week-long retreat designed to strengthen leadership skills and develop the skills necessary to run an FFA chapter.

There are eight weeks the conference is held, and all weeks have about 300 students from all around the United States.

I flew out to the WLC during the sixth week of the conference with my Edgar FFA advisor Mr. Reinders. I learned numerous aspects of leadership positions, agricultural opportunities and had time to tour the nation’s capital.

Theweek-longtripendowedmany strong leadership skills, including public speaking and creative thinking, built new friendships with many other students from around America and taught us about the inner workings of the government and all that needs to happen for it to run efficiently.

My favorite part of the trip was meeting new friends from all around the country, and getting time to spend a week with them and get to know everybody pretty well. In fact, I still talk to the people I met there daily.

I learned a lot from my experience at WLC. By attending, it has opened my eyes to a lot of the things going on in our country in the agricultural community. I had a chance to see all of the national monuments, walk around the capitol building, see the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court building. Although I had to experience all of these wonders of Washington D.C., I can’t help but reflect on some of the things that I experienced in the conference itself. I had one night where my group was split up into different groups according to wealth. This was because we were learning about poverty in the world. The different groups we were in ranged from extremely rich to homeless.

For dinner that night we ate with whatever people in your group, for example homeless people ate next to nothing. It was truly eye opening to gain an understanding of how food is distributed around the world and how wealth and poverty affects how and what people eat.

Overall, attending the WLC was an amazing experience and I would highly recommend it to anybody that has the chance to go.

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