July 20th

Week 1 - Elementary Camp
So first of all, the nature of these camps. I was referring to them as international youth camps, which they are in a sense, but more specifically, the majority of the kids are children in missionary families located here in the Philippines. A majority of them were American, though some of them have only spent a year or two of their lives actually in the States, other were Canada, Australia, Korea, China, and there were some Filippinos there as well. So it was fun hearing stories from these kids who have lived all over the world with their parents who do all sorts of mission work. However, just because they were primarily children of missionaries, don't mean that they were perfect angels - some of them were still more than a handful...haha! <br>
There was a detective theme for the two weeks of camp, and each counselor had to pick a detective nickname (either made up or from a tv show/movie/book) - my nickname was Shaggy (to whom I have been told I bear some resemblance). So for those of you who saw the scooby doo picture on facebook, Miriam, the daughter of the directors of the center, and the one in charge of these camps, photoshopped character pictures that all the counselors used to make a character profile. <br>
Anywho, for the elementary camp I had split role. Some of the time I spent with the elementary aged kids, helping to run games, however I did not stay in a cabin with those kids. I stayed in a cabin with a group of high school boys who were there as, what they referred to as OFWs.
Every year during the week of the elementary camp, they have a group of high school guys and girls come stay at the camp and work on different projects/jobs that need to be done around the camp.
So I stayed in a cabin with those guys at night, and tried to spend some of every day helping them with the different projects that they were working on, which included rebuilding a rope bridge, shredding coconut husks, and removing coconut tree stumps (which I might add, can be ridiculously difficult - the root system wasn't a few large roots, but a giant clump of little roots). I was also put in charge of doing morning devotions for the OFW group - so even though I helped some of the time with their projects, between morning devotion and the time at night when they had to be back I need the cabin, they were out of my control, and under the control of Shane, the brother in law of Miriam, but also a police officer from just outside of Baltimore, Maryland - he did a fine job keeping the kids on in order and on task.
Toads in the Philippines are numerous, and huge. I tell you this not only as an fyi, but because during this first week, I was the recipient of the ol' toads in the bed prank. One in pillow case, one in my dirty shorts pants pocket, and one under the sheet. The two were about the size of my palm, and the third, about the size of my entire hand. The guys thought it was pretty funny...
The times when I was not with the high schoolers I was with the elementary kids, usually facilitating a game of some sort. The kids played several smaller games in the morning, and one big game in each the afternoon and the evening. Probably my favorite game was the unplanned sponge war! The camp went from Sunday to Thursday, and Monday into Tuesday it rained for about a day and a half straight. It would let up a little from time to time, but usually for no longer than an hour. So Tuesday afternoon when it had finally stopped, we went out to the soccer field which now consisted of several big puddles, took a trash can full of sponges, and played in the mud and had a sponge war!
Another fun game the kids did was Fear Factor. They had to go around to different stations and do different scary/disgusting things. Some stations involved crawling through mud, at others they had to eat things (such as balut), at my station they had to kiss a snake - a ten foot python...which I got to hold (Stef, you would have been so proud of me!) for the hour or so the game lasted while the different group came to kiss it! I had a sore shoulder afterwards because it was so heavy, and it ate one kid, but other than that it was a lot of fun ;)
Camp started Sunday and ended on Thursday, so after all the campers left, the counselors went into the mall to hang out in the air condition for a little while and to watch the new spider man movie. We got to sleep in on Friday, as long as we were up before lunch at noon, but my body is so used to getting up early I hard to force myself to stay in bed until 7:30 - I woke up pretty disappointed in myself...haha. Friday and Saturday we spent planning for the upcoming middle school and high school camp and had several hours in there to re-energized, which was nice.
I will talk a little about the high school camp next post... </p>