Faithfulness

Yesterday was really tiring for us, there were a lot of unexpected time gaps where we had to last minute plan games or jokes or just pure entertainment for the kids-thus we were unorganized in those areas, but it was nice to have the kids be close and open up to us by the end of the day. I realized this camp feels like Urban Promise all over again for me, except twice or triple the amount of work due to less people involved and more work on our part to plan everything from scratch.

Its tiring. After lunch I was slowly losing energy and I couldn't even tell the kids to stop running around by the time they were waiting to leave. The heat and constant "go-Go-GO" must have got to me and the team. Yet, God has been great and it was nice to befriend the kids, get to know each other and work to make this camp progress each day.

Also, there is a HUGE language barrier. In Aruba, the kids pick up Papamento (Aruba's lingo) as they grow up, canto/mando speaking with their families, learn Dutch in school, and by around gr.6, they tackle English. Spanish may also be learned in school or picked up from certain areas of Aruba. So what do we do? Thank God for two teens who are wonderful helpers and help us translate almost everything to Papamento, its a pretty sweet language and I'm bewildered at how many lanugages these kids know! Some kids don't talk at all and were still trying to figure out what they do speak haha.

Today was a better day, debriefing and conversing about the goods and bads of camp as a group helped and we were also more organized and perfect on the schedule and timing. Yet, there is a big gap between the ages; there's about 20 ish kids under 10 and 6-7 12-17yr olds, so we really have to do things differently to make it applicable for them, and sometimes be creative and think of things to do that are not too childish or too mature. And some kids, just don't want to be part of anything regardless.

It really hit home when I was playing charades with the kids and I had wanted this one little boy to act out "Jesus", "Do you know who he is?" I asked and he said "no" and told me he wanted to act out something else.

Otherwise, camp has been fun and its not that hot here as everyone had told me, yes you have beads of sweat on your nose and if your outside you just keep sweating but its manageable. Yesterday we also had the priviledge for one of the church members to take us on a tour of Aruba to do some sightseeing! We climbed a mountain!!! 561 steps =D what a work out! It was a challenge to make it to the top, but rewarding to "finish the race".

I hope we will do the same for this camp as well.
Also, I learned to FLOAT today in super salty sea water but in return...
my camera dropped into the water =(.