This has definitely been an interesting week! Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures taken, so you’ll just have to go with my wonderful descriptive words. J
Brian finished putting the new bunk beds together, then he went through and fixed all the old bunk beds that the students have been sleeping on all year. He also had some other more maintency-type work to do this week, like putting in light bulbs and fixing toilets. Now, seriously, how many of you have ever thought about the fact that there needs to be a missionary on a campus who can go through and switch out and date light bulbs? That’s ministry in its rawest form! The rest of the time this week, my dear husband was home with our daughter so I could work with the Bible students.
Because of how the schedules were this year and how busy December and November were, camps was left with only 3 days to finish getting everything ready – all the practices, the decorating, and a myriad of other little details. We have two months of camps. January is all kids; February is all teens. During both months, our students take turns traveling to different provinces to do camps there as well. I had to teach one group the 3 skits for children’s camps, then two different groups everything for teen camps which includes one skit and two choreographies. Since children’s camps begin Monday night, that was my priority. We’ll be able to polish up the stuff for teen camps during January. Although it’ll be hard because in one more week, a bunch of them begin to travel and will miss out on rehearsals if we don’t plan things perfectly!
Every morning, I worked with the 6 students who are doing the children’s camp skits. The skits are really good, but they’re close to 15 minutes each and we only had 3 days for them to learn their lines and figure out how to act it out. Wednesday was great – we got so much done. And… it went downhill from there. By Friday, we just couldn’t get that one learned. So, we’ll be rehearsing Monday morning and then working more on Friday’s skit in some free time during the week.
The teen camps were more complicated and thankfully we have the month of January to finish up! The only skit is pretty, but it seemed to come out good, even with only one day of practice and teaching two separate groups at the same time. The choreographies, though, were a different story. Some of the students were given the responsibility to find the songs and figure out the choreographies, so it was my job to see if they would work and give advice and make sure practices went smoothly. After listening to the first song they wanted to do the choreography to, I just couldn’t let them do it. There was a part in the middle with someone talking and they wanted to have a boy act it out, but it just wasn’t going to work. After consulting with a friend, we decided to change it up. This weekend, my goal is to write a whole new monologue for the boys to act out that still goes with the song, is not too long, and is based on Romans 7.
The second choreography they wanted to do with flashlights, baby powder, and black light. It looked awesome on paper. In real life, well, it wasn’t impossible. But, it definitely wasn’t something we could do with only three days of practice. After working at night with the kids trying to figure out how to hold the flashlights, how to throw the baby powder on the light so it would reflect, and then seeing that none of it was going to work out – we changed up that one, too. In the end, they’re doing the whole thing with just black light. In case you’ve never seen anything done with black light – the idea is that the actors dress all in black except the areas they want to show up. It looks really neat… takes a lot of work!
In the end, we just ran out of time, that’s all there is to it. What we got done was done really well. Now just for the fine-tuning and making the specials something I can put my name on and be proud of when they get presented. I’m really thankful for this opportunity. I love doing stuff like this and even though parts of it were stressful, I did enjoy the last few days working with the kids and getting to know them a little better. We have such a great bunch of students. I wish I could bring all of you down here to meet them! They have such willing hearts and work so hard. They have a long summer ahead of them, but I think they’re up for it!
Kids arrive Monday night and as of earlier this week, 70 were confirmed with another 30 waiting on confirmation. This is great since for the last few years, the first week has always only had 30 kids tops. Should be fun!
It should be fun, though.
