Young Adults Retreat May 2024 – A Recap

Our Young Adults Retreat offers young adults living with muscular dystrophy the opportunity to get out and about together, participate in group activities and workshops and have fun with people their own age. Campers are given the freedom to plan their own program to promote choice and independence. This year, our campers travelled up to Narrabeen and a weekend of laughter, friendship, and fun ensued. We asked camper Jaxon Taylor to provide his account of the weekend.

Not long ago I attended my first Young Adults Retreat. As a proud graduate of MDNSW’s Summer Camps, I was entering new territory. Well, it was at the same venue, so it’s not NEW territory but you get what I mean.  

The first night was pretty cool. We did some getting to know each other games, which was quite useful as I didn’t know as many people as I did at the Summer Camps. That night I also got to play some Jackbox Games with everyone. Jackbox Games are online party games played on our phones. It’s really just a way for us to talk more, and for everyone to try and be more funny than each other. 

On the second day, after going out to play powerchair football, I returned to the retreat and was spoken to about a promotional opportunity. This opportunity was to create a short video for their social media. Now, if you’ve seen the video, you may remember that I claim to have “hacked in” to MDNSW’s social media, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: I just added the hacking line because it added a sense of urgency to the video.  

 The video itself was a really fun experience to develop. From generating ideas to directing to editing and uploading, this retreat allowed me to have the platform to create a really cool video. I’m not going to spoil anything, all I’m going to say is #freeoscar. If you haven’t seen it, you can check it out here.  

 I really enjoyed being able to highlight the great campers and staff through this video. The video does only show the tip of the iceberg of the amazing community, I may have to hack in again next year to show some more of the amazing people… 😉 

 But the video wasn’t the only cool thing we got to do at the camp. One of the funniest things, to me at least, was when we had a movie night on the last night of camp. Now the movie itself wasn’t the funny bit. Barbie is a decent film, but I wouldn’t call it the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. The funny thing was when the movie finished, and as I’m leaving, I realised that the only campers who stayed back were the dudes. Like for a movie with such feminine advertising and focus, it just wasn’t what I expected. There were like 4 of us, and one of us even had an “I am Kenough” hoodie.  

So, if you’re reading this, and you happen to be a young adult with Muscular Dystrophy who lives in or around NSW (In saying this, a mate did fly from Brisbane), then I can’t convince you any more to give it a try. The community is amazing, you get to do some really fun stuff, and you may just even get to feature in my efforts of hacking the MDNSW socials. 

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