Map of the world...

Saturday, September 29, 2007

First week of camp!

Well back to my stories. I can't believe it's taken me so long to update again.
So on Saturday we arrived late at night so we met the Romanian staff and had dinner together and just played around with the few kids that were there for the weekend. On Sunday I gave the team a tour of the camp and after a few hours of free time (trying to get adjusted to the time) we were off to work. We put together the care packages, which included the soup, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, wash cloth, and comb. We also arranged all the crafts and made sure we had everything we needed for each craft. And we also started cleaning up camp and putting all cabins together (making the beds and cleaning up).
Monday morning we finished up what we had left to do and we were waiting patiently for the boys (from around villages) to arrive. The first group from Talmaciu arrived around 11am and we just played with them (mostly soccer) until the rest of the boys and Romanian staff arrived.
The vans were starting to pull up. Lots and lots of boys came out of the vans. I knew one boy out of all 55 of them. I knew some of the Romanian staff and the leader. Marcel is a great leader. He works with children in the villages around Brasov every week and he has an amazing heart to help those children and their families. With God's grace he and his wife had a little girl a couple of years ago and I was so happy to see her. She is a beautiful and smart little girl.
Back to the kids. The kids were between 9 to 19 years old. Some were there for the first time and some have been there before.
The first day we introduce ourselves to the boys and told them our name, where we were from, if this was our first time there, our favorite sport and the animal that we are most afraid of. Can anyone guess mine?
The rest of the day we got to know them by playing with them, eating together and having fellowship together. The boys had the opportunity to read about each one of us. We had our pictures with a little bit about ourselves on the wall in the fellowship hall so the kids can know us better. Here is a picture of that. During the week it was time to put the team to work. At the camp we had three interns who were in charge of the camp areas. We had to help them out with dishes every meal of the day, so a put up a list of each helper per meal, who had bathroom duty, and who was cleaning the hall after each meal. Some needed reminders some were always helping out. The team was great.
For the next few days we got to really know the boys. We did crafts (box cars, kites, albums, name tags), played games (tug of war, soccer, chess, volleyball, 4-way tug of war, and other indoor games), ate all meals together, went on a hike, walked down to the store for ice cream, and shared the love of Christ with them.
We didn't get to have the bon fire this week due to lots and lots of rain. We also had some power outages and no water for a few hours. My team got to learn how to be flexible. We talked about it at all meetings and still some of them were surprised off all the changes that were going on at camp. That's camp life, you never really know what's going on.
Here is a picture of all the boys from the first week of camp.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for the update. Camp sounds like a lot of work! Had you done boys camps before?

Anonymous said...

nice t-shirts! Let's see...animal you are afraid of.. how bout a turtle? j/j Maybe a snake? that's what matthew thinks too, even though a snake is not really an animal.

nicole

Jill said...

I mostly worked with the girls from Turnu Rosu and boys and girls from villages. This year is the fist time they split the boys and girls from villages, but I have worked with only boys from orphanages when I was an intern in 2003. The second week of camp was with boys from an orphanage and I have worked with them before. You will hear more about the second week of camp later. not a turtle and not a snake. Sorry.