Burrito's and camp

July 4, 2009

Happy 4th of July! Thomas and I met up with a couple other volunteers to make food and hang out today. We ended up making some pretty fantastic burrito's. Complete with refried beans, pulled beaf, mexican rice and sour cream. It took about 3 hours to cook everything but it was worth it.... It would have been a perfect day if only I weren't still sick from camp. We met at Cameron's house though, which meant a flush toilet for me. I was so glad we were there because I went once every half hour... not sure if Cameron was glad I was there though! :)

We got back from a very successful youth leadership camp yesterday. We had about 80 students for 5 days at a camp site that reminded me a lot of the Love At Work camp. Same style dorms and kitchen... the only difference was we had an outhouse where Love at Work had toilets. It actually made me a little homesick to be there... made me miss the Gibbs, the Hodge's and Morrissey! So back to the camp.... it went well. We got there on Sunday with the kids and spent the day getting into groups, making a group name, flag and cheer (sound familiar). Our team name was 7th Heaven. This was actually the second try for a team name... the first try was flowers..... just flowers.... then we made up a cheer that went a little like this (imagine it with a clap, stomp kind of dance) Entire group chants "Hello girls, How are you boys?" Then one girl steps up and says "Have you been to 7th Heaven? If not..." Then the group chants "7th Heaven is the best, we are better than all the rest." Sounds simple enough but it took us an hour and a half to come up with! Then the next day real camp started. Everyday the kids had 3 sessions to go to on topics like role models, bride kidnapping, brushing teeth (a big prob here), healthy eating, etc. In the evenings we played capture the flag, which was a huge hit. The last round of the game was 23 volunteers versus 80 students... it went on for 2 hours until the kids gave up! The last night of camp we had a "diso teka". It was beyond amazing. One of the volunteers has a kyrgyz friend who is a dj who came and dj'd the whole thing for us. We all danced our pants off until midnight when everyone passed out in their dorms from exhaustion (volunteers and students). I had no idea that Kyrgyz kids could dance so well until that night.

The kids left camp on Thursday and the volunteers stayed one more night to clean up the camp and hang out. It was nice because we were in the woods where no one could see us or hear us. Not that we did anything crazy (although there was an awesome water hose fight) but it was just nice to be completely away from Kyrgyzstan for one night. We didn't have to worry about what any Kyrgyz people would think or say about how we chose to have a good time.

I've had a few request for some more detailed photo's of my home here as well as my outhouse... those will be posted promptly on Facebook.

While we were gone our family's 17 year old dog died... sad day!