Camp Starts Today - By John

Well, today is the momentous day that the orphan kids start arriving for their week of camp. The physical preparations are pretty much in place, with the exception of some last minute painting and plastering and food buying. Last night, Mavis, who is in charge of the food, told us that after a very major grocery buying trip she had forgotten about bread, so this morning we drove down to the Pick-and-Pay and bought 30 loaves of bread (pretty much cleaned them out of sandwich loaves), after delivering them she said that should cover it for lunch and she’ll let us know if she needs more before breakfast tomorrow!

The camps theme is “I have a future”, because the kids who are attending come from very difficult circumstances and most think that they don’t have a future. Typically, the girls will turn to prostitution and the boys to crime, so this camp is an attempt to show them that they have potential and hope.

The counselors are eager and I think a little nervous, as this is the culmination of a training process that started last January. They have been at camp for the last week, working out the details of the activities and setting up the tents and so on. We had a big rainstorm a few nights ago, and found out that the tents hadn’t been set up correctly, and so a man from the local Boy Scouts came and gave us some good pointers (Thanks Jerry!). The basic problem was that the tents roofs weren’t “tight” enough. Since then, “Tight” (pronounced “TAAIEET” has become the new buzzword around here (meaning “good”) so everything from the tents to the singing to the food is “Tight!”. On Thursday night we had a big send-off for the Canadians who came and helped with the camp construction. A local gospel band came to play, and before you knew it (actually during the sound check) everyone was dancing (except our girls, who had embarrassed and terrified looks on their faces to see their Mom dancing with an African man). There were some very interesting moves shown by both the Africans and Canadians. The band was great, five guys singing, drums and keyboards, and it was a LOT of fun. Here is a link to the video (about 2 Meg)

Here are some pictures of the camp. This is a picture of the registration,

the next is of the completed climbing wall (yay!)

and the third of the tents. There are 10 tents in all.

This week Chuck is out of town in Mozambique, so its our responsibility to finish off some construction and getting ready for a big meeting that’s happening of the 12^th. We are also looking forward to our upcoming MCC retreat which also starts on the 12^th, so it should be a really busy week of supervision and preparation.

Today I made buns according to my Mom's recipe. I haven't been able to find Lard or Shortening, but used something called "White Margarine", and they still tasted pretty good. Hmmm... I'm starting to have thoughts about reviving the "Wood Fired Mud Oven".