Vertigo (1)

Week 2:  June 7-13

Wow.  So Bronco I (first camp for 10- and 11-year-olds) week is over.  I can now say that I succeeded in being more tired this week than I was during my last post...  But it was all worth it.  This is going to be long, but I'll just start from the beginning.

MONDAY:

I could not start a fire in the stove inside my cabin to save my life.  I had to get help from my teammates more than once on getting a fire going that day, and I had to endure the ridicule of my girls.  Oh well.  It builds character, right?

The campers showed up in the late morning.  I had 8 girls in my cabin:  Chandler, Jimmie, Michaela, Samantha, Laurel, Maggie, Kelley, and Ashlee.  (One of them sounded exactly like the babysitter from The Incredibles – no joke.)  I also had a JC (junior counselor) named Lauren, and she was a huge help.  After getting a group picture, we all headed over to the opening rally and then had lunch.  We then did lots of other activities and things that I can’t remember now.

After chapel that night, we all came back, and I had one of my teammates make a fire for us.  The counselors are required to lead a devotional before the campers go to bed, which was actually my favorite part of the day.  When we were all ready for bed and had the fire going, I had my girls drag a few mattresses off their bunks and onto the floor around the stove so we could talk.  I asked them what they thought about the message in chapel and if they had any questions about God or the Bible.  Let me tell you, kids can think of the craziest questions.  “What if the people who wrote the Bible were wrong?”  “How do we know it’s real?”  “How did God begin?”  It was a great time to connect with the girls and get a feel for how many of them were familiar with the church and the Bible.  The night wasn’t so pleasant after bedtime, though.  I had told the girls it was okay to wake me up if they had any problems during the night or needed someone to take them to the bath house.  I had been informed earlier by the nurse that one of the girls was a bed-wetter, so I let the whole group know to let me know if they needed a new sleeping bag or anything else in the middle of the night.  One of them woke me up around 1am to take them to the bathroom.  Right after I got back, one of the girls walked up to me to say that she had wet the bed.  Awesome.  I had her put her wet clothes in a trashbag, took them to the laundry room, and made sure she was squared away before I went back to bed.

TUESDAY: 

Each day following Monday had a theme, and Tuesday was Camo Day.  I was excited because it meant I got to wear my new camo shorts for the first time, though I think I was the only one in my cabin who dressed up. 

There’s a time during the day that is specifically set aside for “cabin cleanup.”  According to the rules, you are supposed to have your cabin sweep the floor and outside porches, clean the shelves, make their beds, and hang up decorations on the inside.  The “cabin checkers” walk around about an hour later to assign points to each cabin for the quality of their work.  I did a rough sweep of the floors and had the girls make their beds, and they made a welcome mat out of leaves, sticks, and pine cones, but that was about it.   We failed cabin cleanup and got the lowest score of all the cabins.  My girls and I were pretty bummed, but I told them we would just do an awesome job for the next day.

After rotations (scheduled activities), the campers did a scavenger hunt, in which each cabin team raced all over camp.  Instead of hunting for items, though, campers had to complete tasks as a group, such as doing the hokey pokey or making a pyramid.  Those of us from the lower 48 (as they call the U.S. mainland) learned very quickly that Alaskans don’t do too well in the sun and heat.  It had been pretty warm and sunny all week, and it wore the kids out.  I couldn’t believe how much more energy I had than all these kids.  Most of my girls couldn’t run at all after 2 or 3 minutes of playing.  One of them in particular was always last and refused to walk more than about 11 steps per minute.  She complained the entire time, but it got to the point where I actually wanted to strangle her at the very end of the game.  She had been whining and dragging her feet the entire time, but she somehow found the energy to sprint to the end when another team was right on her tail.  I was fuming but glad it was finally over.

Throughout the week, Bronco I campers play a game called Quiz Quest.  This took me back to the glory days of Bible quizzing, so I was pretty excited about it.  Each cabin competed against each other and quizzed over questions about their memory verses they learned at the “flag raising/lowering” at the beginning and end of each day, their skills classes (canoeing, cooking, sports, horsemanship, etc.), and morning devotions.  They were also asked questions about the chapel messages, testimonies, and the people who spoke.  Like Bible quizzing, the campers sat on a bench and had to stand up when they wanted to answer the questions.  If cabins wanted extra points, they could memorize verses from a list given to them at the beginning of the week.  My girls memorized 10 verses total, so we got 1000 extra points (100 points for each verse) that day.  That definitely helped, in light of our failed cabin cleanup and the fact that my girls weren’t that good at quizzing.  Two of my girls actually choreographed a dance for Genesis 1:1, which was hilarious.  It will be posted to Facebook later this summer.

“Sweet Dreams” is the name of a kind of stealth mission that each cabin performs when they are “supposed” to be in bed.  Earlier that day, a staff worker told each of the counselors to pick a place to hide a plate of cookies, and they would take their cabins to find them later that night.  The idea is that the counselors are supposed to trick their campers into thinking that they had gotten one of their friends to hide some cookies for them, and they were supposed to sneak out of their cabins to obtain them without getting caught.  My girls loved it.  I told them that I had told Jon-Michael (one of the camp directors) how well they had done during the game, so he stashed some cookies for us on top of the swing set.  We sneaked around the outside of the cabin, through the forest, ducked in the trees because “someone’s coming!”, and sprinted down the beach along the treeline to the swingset.  After finding the plate of cookies by the slide, we went back the way we came.  The whole thing kind of backfired a little while later when my girls went to the bath house.  Girls from another cabin said that they had just gone on a mission to find their cookies, so I had to do much more lying than I would have liked afterwards to convince them that the game was real and that maybe Jon-Michael wanted to reward each cabin for doing well.  I think they bought it for the time being, which was fine with me.  I thought it was sweet that they really wanted to thank him for the cookies, which I made sure he knew about before they did.

Devotions that night were pretty intense.  I stayed up for a couple of hours with the girls, explaining the how Jesus’ death saved us, how Catholics can be Christians too, how to become a Christian, and other things they had questions about.  One of the girls wanted to tell me that she had just asked Jesus to forgive her sins (though she was already a Christian), and I learned later that week that another one of the girls asked Jesus into her heart that night.  The faith of children truly amazes me.  It seemed that a few of them couldn’t even fathom the idea that God might not exist.  They laughed as they said, “If God didn’t create the world, then how else would we be here?”  Their innocence and assurance of the truth was incredible to witness.

While the Lord saw fit to bless me with a non-bed-wetting cabin that night, I guess He thought it would be good for me to get woken up three times by a girl who couldn’t sleep.  After about 20 minutes of lying in bed, she came up to me and told me she couldn’t fall asleep.  I told her that she just needed to try.  The second time, I got up and prayed with her and tried to comfort her.  The third time (in my infinite patience), I told her that I couldn’t help her and that she just needed to go lie down and close her eyes.  She finally fell asleep a little while later.

This is good for now.  I’ll try to finish this week’s recap later tonight or tomorrow.