Last Sunday I left the church and picked up Cathie Courtois and immediately drove up to the Christian Conference Center in Newton, IA. Cathie counseled for the high school camp in the cabin side and I counseled for the middle school camp in the rustic side. How rustic you may be wondering? We sleep on wooden platforms in the middle of the woods with tents over us. We make our breakfasts and dinners over open fires which we build.
Sometimes counselors can get stuck with kids who don’t like to work and then the meals and living situation really starts to get bad. Mine was awesome. My co-counselor was Melanie Van Weelden and I had 11 youth living in our village. When we told them what needed done they worked incredibly hard. What a treat!
The best part of the week had to be our village community. The guys were a hoot! During FOB (Flat on Back/Bed/Bunk/TakeYourPick) time they decided to make up different cheers and new verses to some of the songs we sang. They even made a verse to one of our favorites (“Flea-Fly”) where they substituted some of the words for the names of all in our tent. It was great!
The words part of the week was definitely the heat. Thursday was the worst. I still haven’t heard what the temperature and heat-index were, but it was bad. When I left the camp on Saturday at 12:30 it was 101 out with a heat index around 115 degrees.
Another highlight for the week is that the youth had a dance on Thursday night that lasted 2.5 hours. What’s even better is that they were dancing the entire time. I’ve never seen this successful of a Chi Rho dance. 
We (some of the counselors) also got glow sticks and bracelets and necklaces before we got to camp; let’s just say that the effect was cool with a darkened shelter house.
Friday night we also decided as a camp to sleep under the stars. We pulled all of our cots out onto the lawn by the shelter house and had the guys on one side and the girls on the other with the counselors down the middle. I’ve never done it before and I have to say: it’s nice! I stayed up until 2:45 talking with some of the other counselors. We then had to get up early (I think before 7am).
So it’s now Sunday afternoon and I’m exhausted. I drove some of the Keokuk youth back yesterday afternoon and arrived at 3:45 and had the last one gone by 4:45. After that I got some great pictures of the inside of the new church’s sanctuary. The evening was capped by a wonderful dinner with Tom and Kathy as well as Tom’s mother and two of their friends (Daryl and Marcia). Why is it so easy to find such wonderful people in this town?
I’m finishing up some other e-mails and then going to take a nap for the rest of the day and then do some reading. It’s hard catching up with e-mails when one has been gone for a week.
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