Registered for classes today : )

I'm taking Intro to Creative Writing, Spanish, and Lifestyles of Nonviolence. That's all, because the Spanish class is intense and counts for 8 hours. I'm pumped.

Still waiting on my roomie to get here : /

Recap

So once again time has gotten away from me, and I now find myself at school and still with so much goodness to share from the summer, so I'm just going to try to do a brief recap of the main events of the last few weeks of camp.

Remember my last entry was titled Week 5, Part 1? Well Part 2 was going to be titled Adventures With the Code Inspector. Oh yeah. Here's the story in a nutshell: One day the code inspector just drove up to my worksite, and I saw his car and immediately started freaking out in the inside. Fortunately it took him a minute to get out of the car, which gave me a minute to send one of my campers down the street to Emily's worksite to have her call Joe and tell him to get his butt over there, because I realized too late that I had given Antavius my phone to play with and he hadn't given it back yet. So dear, sweet Brennan ran down the street to find Emily while I went and talked to the code man, whose name turned out to be Garret. He was ok for having such a jerk job, but he gave us tickets for working without permits (Permits cost over a hundred bucks each. We try to slip by without them whenever possible). Fortunately Joe showed up about halfway through the discussion so I didn't have to deal with that part. Garret the Code Inspector then proceeded to get back in his car and roll through all 5 of the worksites we had in that community, writing tickets at each of them. Lucky for us Joe is a beast, so by lunch the next day we had all of the permits we needed to continue working as normal, and that was the end of that.

The only other major event I can think of is the middle of Week 7, when my grandma died that Tuesday night. We knew she probably wouldn't make it through the summer and went up to Connecticut in May to say goodbye, but being at Teameffort I had sort of forgotten, so it still hit me really hard when she did die. The roughest part was still having to get up Wednesday morning and be a camp counselor and having to pretend I was fine and to be happy for the campers when all I really wanted was to be alone. It was very hard, and I'm grateful that Joe and Caitlin were very supportive and allowed me to occasionally slip away when we were back and camp and just sit by myself and be sad. The craziest part of the whole thing though was that my campers still thought I was freakin awesome. They called themselves Team Megan, and at the end of the week my two groups from that week collaborated to buy me a little angel figurine, which is now sitting on the desk in front of me. I was completely blown away by God's goodness in that situation, that even though I felt so disengaged from my campers that week they still had an amazing week, and that God doesn't need me to even be paying attention to work through me in their lives, that He needs me so little and yet still blesses me to have this relationship with them. God is so good.

So that was the end of camp. It was very hard to say goodbye, both to Sweet T and the rest of the staff. I didn't have much time to be sad though, because as soon as I got home I turned around and left again to go to Puerto Rico with the rest of the Teameffort staff from all the different camps. It was an amazing experience. Puerto Rico is the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life. I took almost 300 pictures, most of which I hope to get up on Facebook very soon. We did some food distribution in down town Ponce, went cliff diving in the jungle, and generally just rested. It was fantastic, and got me caught up enough on sleep that I could stay up till 2:30 the night I got back and finish packing for school with the help of my wonderful friends Kate and Lydia. I moved in yesterday, orientation week began today, and my roommate should be here in about an hour. This place is so beautiful, and I'm incredibly excited for all the adventures to come!

Week 5, Part 1

Week 5 was kind of intense, and by kind of I mean a lot. Instead of being at Sweet T's house I was working on a cluster of 4 houses down the street from her. I was by myself there with 23 campers and at least 6 different jobs going on at once, so I was constantly being pulled in different directions and it felt like people were constantly calling my name and asking me questions. It was quite stressful at first but by Tuesday I had adjusted to the pace. Also, Mondays are the hardest day of the week wherever you are because no one has really figured out their job yet at everyone has questions. But it got better, and I was also blessed enough to have a very hard working group that week, which I appreciated more than I could tell them, because with 4 houses on the site and everyone around a different corner I could only ever see one group working at a time, meaning that it would have been really easy for the kids to just stop working as soon as I wasn't looking at them, but they didn't. They worked really hard and had fantastic attitudes. I wish that there had been less going on that week, that I'd had less jobs going on to keep track of, so that I could have had more time to just hang out and talk with them while they worked, because they were all wonderful and I wish I had been able to get to know them more. There was one girl named Brennan who was about my age, maybe a little older, I think she was a chaperone, who was always smiling and happy and never failed to make me feel better when I was stressed. It was clear that she loved being there and was there because she wanted to serve, and I wish I'd had more time to talk to her because I think we could've been friends. There was also Kyle, a high schooler who allowed me to film him doing something super goofy he called “the peace dance” for the weekly video. He always wanted to play with Niema, a three year old girl whose grandma lived in one of the houses we were working on, but Niema said she couldn't play with boys because there was a boy who was digging her and he wouldn't like it. By the end of the week he got her to play with him though : ) They made a sand castle in the dirt. Niema herself was really fun, and always made things interesting. She may only be three, but that girl knows how to get her way. When she was around she always had someone playing with her, and once you started playing it was impossible to stop without getting someone else to come up and distract her long enough that you could slip around a corner before she noticed you leaving. But playing with Niema isn't so much playing as just doing what you're told, because she's already decided how the game is going to go. She decided that she was our mommy and we were all her babies, and one sunny day when she decided it was raining she chased everyone who walked past her with sticks saying “Here baby, take your umbrella!”. She was so adorably persuasive that I learned to carry lumber with one hand a hold an umbrella with the other. One of the worst things about that week was always having to tell Niema that I couldn't play with her because I had to work, but one day I managed to mix work and play by playing horsey, so I would run around and check on all the campers while carrying Niema on my back and neighing every minute or so. It's way more fun that it sounds. She named me Princess Horsey, and her name is Princess Pink. I love having children on my worksites : )

The End

Today is Sunday, Day 1 of the last week. It's hard to believe it's the end. This summer has flown by, and I'm not ready to say goodbye yet. I've spent all summer with my staff here, and I don't know what I'm going to do without the little things like Matt sticking his finger in the air and going “Pew pew!” every time I say “Shoot!”, or Gus filming everything, or Miranda's general skittishness and hilarity. Everyone here is full of little quirks that I love so much, and I'm going to miss them all dearly. On the other hand, I miss my friends at home quite dearly as well, and I am ready to see them. I'm listening to a mix cd right now that was made for me by my friend Kat before I left, and I got a letter Friday from my dear Andie that made my day but also made me miss her even more that I already did. I'm ready to be home, but at the same time I'm not looking forward to it. Even though we haven't left the country, going home from Teameffort is always accompanied by a major culture shock that I am not looking forward to. I don't remember how to move in a world where I'm not a camp counselor, where I am not serving others 24/7 and am not constantly being barraged by requests for toilet paper and questions about when and where to buy t-shirts. However, now that I think about it, just because I leave Teameffort doesn't mean I should stop serving 24/7, I just won't constantly be getting toilet paper for people. It really is awkward going home now. I am so far removed here from the world of consumerism and materialism that just eating at a packed and swanky P.F. Changs last night was a little uncomfortable for me. I'm not looking forward to the shock of going home.

I won't be home for long though. We're leaving Myrtle Beach on Saturday (6 days!), but we're making some surprise overnight stop somewhere, which I'm quite excited about but it means we won't be getting back to TE headquarters in Gainesville until Sunday. We'll be getting there early in the afternoon and I'll have to stick around there for a little while to help unload everything, so I won't actually be getting home until late afternoon Sunday, only to turn around and leave again the same time the next day. About 70 Teameffort staff members are going on a mission trip to Puerto Rico, and we're leaving so early on Tuesday that they won't tell us how early we're leaving yet, so I'm going to spend the night with everybody else in Gainesville on Monday so I don't have to worry about meeting them in the morning. I also want to get there in time for dinner, because Monday night the staff has a big dinner where everyone else their craziest summer stories, and I want to be there to spend a little time with my Teameffort family from other camps, which means I'll only be home for about 24 hours before turning around and leaving again. We'll be spending 4 days in Puerto Rico, then returning home late Saturday night. Our flight gets in around 10 I think, which gives me about 12 hours to unpack and do laundry, because I move into my dorm Sunday afternoon. Oh yeah. I'll be home for about a day and a half total, and with so much to do in so little time I won't have time to see many people before I leave, which is sad but I'm already coming to terms with it. It is what it is, and my life is a whirlwind. I'm excited though. It's going to be very fun. It's hard to believe that 2 weeks from now I'll be in my dorm and my new school! Wow. Life is crazy.