Monday, April 07, 2008

Campamento 2008

Hola! Hola?? Is anyone reading this??
Its hard to believe that I've already been here for over a month in this land far, far away from what I know as home.
Camp is done, the Canadian team has long gone home (to snow, I might add), and school starts in a week today! I have so much to do before next monday. I'm nervous and excited.

It probably will take me a few posts to get you all caught up on whats been going on here... lets start with camp.sh stuff!

While the Canadians were here we worked in the school for a couple of days, scraping and washing walls, painting, generally just cleaning the place up. I think that it looks great (except for where our green paint seperated and it looks a bit like the MacDonald or MacKay bridges in Halifax).
Also, on tuesday night we went to church in block 6 and wednesday we went to block 10. It was so good to go to both places and see people that i havent seen in so long. Of course it was POURING both nights that we went, but that is just a part of the experience.

After working at the school for tuesday and wednesday, we all headed off to camp for a weekend of staff training. This is alot like what we have at Malagash, where the volunteer staff go and hang out and we do some games, sing a bit, hang out, and do some sessions. I feel that it was a great way for our team to get to know some of the Ecuadorian leaders that we'd be working with the next week, so I'm glad that we were able to be there.

Above are a few Canadians and a lot of Ecuadorians learning actions to the songs for kids camp.

On sunday all the Ecaudorians went back to Guayaquil so they could ride the bus out with the kids in the morning. The rest of us hung out at camp, hand washed our laundry (something that I'm slower than a snail at doing), went to th beach, got sunburned, then headed into Playas to check emails and eat dinner.

The next week was kids camp... elementary aged kiddies. When they arrived they were greeted by tonnes of balloons, the pounding of drums, guys on stilts dressed on clowns. To me that is scary, nearly nightmare material, but they seemed to LOVE it!

The week was filled with competitions between the teams (rojo, azul, amarillo, verde). Lots of games, beautiful beach time, and cool conversations. Its really neat how language barriers can be beaten, and that people can become friends even though they come from totally different places and speak different lanugages entirely.

The line from the Downhere song kept running through my head all week "... theres no lanugage on earth where His praises are not heard...". I thought it was neat how though many times perhaps we didnt understand their words, or them ours, we were still singing and talking to the same God.The joyful racket that was coming out of all of our mouths was going to him, and He loved it.
working on a team flag
water balloon fight!
.Alfredo on the beach.
Check out http://beach.quist.ca/gallery World Travel- Ecuador- camp 2008 for more pictures of this years trip... I'm still in the process of putting them all on there though... be patient, they'll come.
**none of these pics are mine. They're Miranda's or Heather's.

2 comments:

Briggins said...

thanks for the update.

Christiane said...

Good update Jules :) Thanks for the info and fotos :) Can't wait for more... you've got treats coming with Beth... so exciting :) Love you!