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 : )