The Friday that is smack-dead in the middle of the week is THEME DAY, where we form 12 teams of 10 kids of all ages, and compete together/against eachotehr in a variety of creative games.
Theme day began with our excellent time travelers disequilibrating, disengaging, and straight-up-breaking the time travel machine. The teams were set out to find clues which would help us find the missing part that could repair the machine, by journeying to 12 different time periods! The games included:
A Roman Relay: an obstacle course run in teams attached as slaves by a cord
A 15th Century Pirate Naval Battle: launching "cannon balls" to knock down bowling pins
A visit to Martin Luther King Jr., where groups wrote poems describing their dreams to improve the world
A Bible Copying Relay at an 8th Century Monastery
Identifying ingredients in a possibly poisoned drink for King Louis XIV
An 80's Dance Composition to a Michael Jackson Remix
Build a human pyramid for the Pharaoh and Queen Cleopatra
The challenges concluded with each team assembling their clues into a puzzle, and then each team's puzzle fit into a larger puzzle which contained the clue as to where the missing part for the machine was hiding.
Upon reinstallation of the part, the three bumbling time travelers still could not bring us back to our own time period!
Because the time space continuum was still entirely screwy, the monk from the year 792 appeared. Though he came from a technologicaly-impaired era, he was able to inform us of what our machine was missing. The monk knew that what was essential for travel in the space-time continuum was a fixed point. "When you traveled through time and met so many different persons, was there any person who was there for all of it? Who is present throughout all of time?" The key point, around which we could orient our machine and our lives permanently in space and time is Jesus himself.
After his speech, the monk exited the scene and our voyagers oriented their machine (their most difficult acting assignment yet) and took us back to the future.
After years of coming/sending other people to Centre Bonnefoi from the Pitman Road Church of Christ for their week of construction and renovation of the camp, it is neat to see the Harmony Bible Camp in Action.
The camps' mission statement includes getting kids to appreciate God and his creation. Until our evening of tent camping, and hearing all the whining of "I can't wait to get back to where everything is paved over!" I didn't realize how many of our campers were uprooted right from the city and plopped into the mountains.
As a counselor, I lead devotionals with my 4 campers every night. They are usually quite tired after a long day of 2 activities of choice, an hour long Bible class, and an evening activity, but they enjoy discussing the Bible passages and singing songs simultaneously in English, French and Italian (I have 2 French and 2 Italian girls in my room). It is already Monday, and camp ends on Friday.
I also have to organize four activities for the campers. I already lead a class of the Hebrew Alphabet and sewed Hackysacs. Tomorrow I am leading the first French version of World Vision's Tribe game, and Thursday we will be making Flipbooks and learning about the Animation process.
Time flies when you're having fun!
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