May 29th

It's a few days later than I was anticipating being able to post some more of my experiences at camp, but the last two days hav been a little busier than I anticipated. Sunday afternoon we went back to church and played volleyball with the young adults for a while, and then that evening we had a basketball scrimmage for a church league that starts next week (?) - this is another one of those things that I don't really know many details, I just get in the car when they tell me to...haha.
And yesterday, we spend the morning harvesting the rice fields - it only took about 2.5 - 3 hours (to clear the field), but it was a hard couple hours of work. There were about 6 guys with machete that would go out and cut the rice off about half way down the plant, and then the rest of us would gather and take it and put it in a pile so that it could be run through a machine that separates the grains from the stalk. The bundles of rice that we carried out of the field were usually between 20 and 30lbs, which I know that ow doesn't sounds like much, but add the fact that your walking through the field in mud that comes halfway up your calves - its gets tiring pretty quick!
In the afternoon I went to get my visa extended, and that has been somewhat more of a process than anticipated, but I will finish that up tomorrow. After that I went with a couple of people from Bethel to have a Bible story with some of the kids from one of the feeding programs we did a couple weeks back - they asked that we come back every now and then to do a Bible story with them - that was exciting to hear, and just as encouraging was how excited the kids were when we showed up, partially because we were there, but some of them were genuinely excited to here a story from the Bible (kids between the ages of 5 and 13) - that was great to see! And then last night we went to a carnival for the towns local fiesta that has been going on the last week.
Camp - the kids were divided into 1 of 5 different colors, and those were their teams for the week. The games every afternoon were competitions to earn points, and at the end of the camp the winners get a prize. Some of the games were different water relays, building human towers in the pool, and a Bible quiz bowl. There was also an obstacle to course that involved a lot of mud - some of the staff (myself included) did that one, I enjoyed that! And afterwards I actually raced Mac Mac, one of the Sankey kids, in a head to head, full contact race through the course...I thought that the full contact aspect of it would allow me to win for sure, being that I'm twice his size, but that didn't matter since I couldn't catch him. He beat me twice in a row, and made sure as many people knew about it as possible - haha!
We also did an amazing race at the beach, the teams all went around to different stations and completed different tasks as fast as they could. My station was to have 5 members do a trust fall, the first group flew threw it, because they picked five people who weren't scared at all, so I made an adjustment and before they started the task, I asked who was afraid of heights, and had those people do it! That slowed things down a bit!
The camp food was good, I was tired of rice by the end of the week though. We had white rice with every meal - and for breakfast, one of the other dishes in addition to white rice, was fried rice - I chuckled a bit about that. The last day at the beach some of the kids and I had an unofficial snack - we ate crab fresh from the sea, and still alive! They were only about the size of a quarter and it started out as a dare, so I said I would do it if a couple other people did, and sure enough, I ate one first and then 2 other guys and 1 girl ate one as well. It wasn't bad, I could taste a bit of crab, but the strongest taste was the salt from the water.