Camp! Weeks 1 and 2

The last three weeks have been so fantastic, but of course not without their share of rough moments. I'm going to try to give a brief recap of the last three weeks without making this entry too too long, with the hopes of making time to write about each week as they happen in the future.

So, Week 1 I was at Tomasina's house by myself with a group of 11, 8 high school girls, one brave high school boy, and two chaperones, Buddy and Jill. That week we were scrubbing, priming, and painting her house, which seemed like a relatively futile place to start seeing as her house is in such serious disrepair, but it was an easy place to start and since I have such limited construction experience and there were everyone else's worksites to plan as well we just started there. I was nervous about being in charge of a worksite by myself, but I quickly realized that, while making sure everyone is doing what they need to do, doing it right, has what they need, are drinking water, not miserable, and figuring out what to get them working on after that is not always an easy task, it's nothing to be scared of and not as hard as I thought after I developed the confidence to make decisions without a second opinion. The girls were a little quiet but very sweet, and they opened up more as the week went on. They were a little shy with me, but I had a great time watching them laugh and bond as a group throughout the week, especially after Caitlin (one of my camp directors) told me that Buddy, their youth pastor, had only taken up the position the previous week, when their original youth paster was deployed to Iraq. It was their first anything together, and by the end of the week they are laughing and joking together. One of my chief joys of that week was watching the relationships strengthen and bonds from within that small group.
As I said though, no week is without its share of trials, and in this case it was the house itself. Tomasina's house is a very frustrating case, because it's in terrible condition, but there are a lot of things we just can't fix. For example: the aluminum siding on her trailer is torn up and peeling back around many of the edges, but as a rule Teameffort doesn't work with metal like that because the edges are so sharp they'll cut you at the slightest slip up, and when middle schoolers and high schoolers are doing most of the work slip ups are inevitable, so all we could do was put a new coat of paint around the holes. Also, we are still at a loss for a solution for the roof (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, go back an entry or two and read about Tomasina's roof). Joe mentioned to me last week that he had some harebrained idea, but it was too complicated to explain to me so he we going to try to explain it to Glenn, our contractor, and see what he thought. That was the last I heard of it, but Joe did tell me the other day that he has another concern. Tomasina's house is located along a popular shortcut to city hall, so if we do anything too crazy it will be noticed and we'll run the risk of being shut down. Dwarfing this, however, is the fact that if any city officials do come out to inspect what we're doing, even if our work meets all their requirements and codes, her house is in such a state that it's likely to be condemned if anyone looks to closely, so in trying to repair her house we could actually get her kicked out of it. This is quite a conundrum, and we still have not even a shadow of a solution, but there are still 5 weeks left in the summer so the fight is not over yet!

On to Week 2! I hope you're not tired of reading yet. Last week I was working with Natalia at the Waccamaw Youth Center, a home for boys who have been abused and abandoned. It can house up to about 15 boys age 8-21, though I'm not sure how many are currently living there. I only met three of them Robert, an extremely sweet teenager who I joked with about his failure to water the plants, Nico, who was quieter than Robert but still friendly, and was often on the computer in the rec room where we went to cool off, and C.J., who brought us all tootsie pops on Thursday and worked alongside the group that was there this past week. It's run by this fantastic man named Mike, who provided us all with apple juice and ice cream and reminded me to wear sunscreen when my face was looking pink. I loved talking to Mike. He is such a sweet man and was so overwhelmingly excited and grateful that we were there that it was impossible to leave a conversation with him without a warm fuzzy feeling in my heart. There is a lot of work to do at Waccamaw, because it's a big place and in a house full on teenage boys things get broken regularly, and we started by repairing, scraping, scrubbing, and priming the four decks attached to the main house. I seem to be doing a lot of painting. But as much as I love Waccamaw and the people there, what made that week so memorable was the kids. Believe it or not, I started out the week feeling bored and a little fidgety. As much as Myrtle Beach is different from Tampa, the structure of the day and the way we do things are so much the same that I found myself tired already of hearing the same nightly talks, the same messages, answering the same questions. I don't know exactly why, but I could see the summer panning out before me with each week looking exactly like the one that had just passed, and exactly like last summer as well. I got so caught up in the work aspects of the week that I forgot about what made it interesting and why I'm here. And boy did these kids remind me! Natalia and I had two groups, one of all middle schoolers from Massanutten Presbyterian Church in Virginia and one of mostly high schoolers from Central UMC in North Carolina, totaling 28 people on our worksite, and man were these kids awesome! I don't really know how to begin to describe them. When I was told we would have a group of all middle schoolers, I groaned in anticipation of a bunch of kids with bad attitudes, too worried about being cool to have any fun with (that's what my middle school group was like last summer), but the kids from Massanutten were the exact opposites. They had great attitudes. They spent the first day and a half on the worksite scraping paint off the porches with hardly any complaint. They were goofy and fun, and we just clicked. It was so hot on Tuesday that three of the girls did a rain dance in hope of summoning some rain to cool us down, and twenty minutes later we had to leave the worksite because there was a storm coming! I learned from their leaders (who were also incredibly sweet and great with the kids) that almost all of them had gone to preschool together and been friends their entire lives, and their relationships made for lots of silliness among themselves that I had the pleasure of witnessing, because they weren't afraid of being goofy around each other. And speaking of relationships, so many new ones formed that week! I wasn't sure what it would be like having two different groups on a worksite. I expected that they would get along well enough, but that everyone would spend most of their time with the people they already knew, but in hopes of encouraging some integration, Monday morning I had everyone go around and say their names, not expecting that everyone would even remember half of them, and expecting even less that by the end of the week they would know all of them and that these two groups would be so close they would all have each other's phone numbers and would be planning to meet up for a group ski trip, which is what actually happened. I can't describe to you how amazing it was to watch those relationships form. One of my favorite moments of the week, and undoubtedly a favorite memory of the summer, was sitting on the beach during our closing program and being able to watch Tim, a chaperone from Virginia, told Dylan, a high schooler from North Carolina, what a great man he was growing into and how proud he was of him. Another of these memories is when Jonny, an eighth grader with the Massanutten group, plopped down next to me on the beach, smiled at me and just said, "Thanks", to which I responded with a simple "You're welcome". We sat there in silence for a few minutes, just looking at the ocean, but after a few minutes I noticed that he was crying. I asked him what was wrong and if he wanted to talk about it, to which he just shook his head and said,"I'm just happy". Bam. I think that is perhaps my favorite memory of all, including last summer. People often cry during the closing program, but I know that for a lot of them whatever made them cry that night will be forgotten as soon as they go home and nothing will change in their lives, but the happiness that comes from encountering God is not something anyone forgets, because why would you want to forget joy like that? I feel like I'm not doing a good job of portraying the strength of these moments or the effect these crazy kids had on me. They reminded me what it is I'm doing here, made me laugh like nothing else and smile till my face hurt and forget how tired I already am of eating the same stupid meals every week. I missed them the minute they pulled out of the parking lot at 7am, which would have been a much longer goodbye had we not all been so tired from getting up at 5:30 to watch the sunrise on the beach together. Beautiful. Really it was just Massanutten that left that early, but Central got up two hours before their scheduled breakfast time to watch the sunrise with them and see them off. All of these kids touched my heart, and I regret my inability to capture them in words, and that lack of space I have (I'm trying not to make this too too long. I try!) to tell you about Big Mama, Heather and Devan, twins with personalities as opposite as their fire red and dark brown hair, Bossman Tim and the lovely Alana, who I always referred to as Mother Alana in my head because she really is mother to everyone around her. I wish I had time and space to tell you about all of these things, but I've already decided that Week 3 will have to wait for another post out of sympathy for your attention span, and I think Week 2 will end hear. If you would like to hear more, comment, call, or whatnot. I look forward to more memories to tell you <3