Day 3 - start of PLAYDAYS!

 Hello! It is a chilly start here on Monday.  

Woke up to a temperature of 9C.  Good thing is that there are few to no mosquitos around right now. You can see the mist on the lake as the temperature slowly begins to rise.

The food team began at 6am - meaning wake up around 5-5:30am to start preping food for the day.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner all need to be made before we leave the camp.  Menu for the day was:

Breakfast - scrambled eggs and toast (we did 4 dozen eggs)

Lunch - turkey sandwiches (had to wash the lettuce, and brought tomatoes to slice, bring the cold cuts and cheese as well as cucumbers

Dinner - Spaghetti and either meat sauce or meatballs. The meats were saute’d at the camp and brought in instant pots (from home) I believe we had some 6 jars/cans of spaghetti sauce added with the meat and veggies.  Spaghetti to be cooked in the city along with garlic bread.  We had so much food… and that is a blessing.

Not one.. but TWO full pots!

We were able to join the Northwind staff for their staff meeting, and met some new faces and said hello to some familiar ones. 

 We went through some intercultural ministry training, looking at a picture that we zoom in and in and in on.  You get to think about your place in the large puzzle. Sometimes you are not quite sure where your picture fits, until someone makes a connection with you and you feel you belong. Think about your own life and situation. Do you feel sometimes you just don’t fit? What do you do? How did you join? What about those we meet - in your work places, on the street, at church; can we help them to feel welcome where we are? I think about this in my many roles in life and how can I help others to be a part and not feel like or be treated as an outsider?

After our hearty lunch (really we have too much food!) we packed for play days to Windsor St.  This was a smaller set which also allowed us to work through the newness of doing play days, not only for us as a team but also summer students (through Canada Summer Grants). Here we had some carnival like games (e.g., bean bag toss, frisbee toss, plinko, frog leap…) and the team along with coach Gabe ended up doing some games/drills with many of the residents there. We also had hot dogs and snow cones.  We forgot a few things, but made do.  At the end the team told the story of creation - dramatized in actions and how we are redeemed cleansed because of Jesus and the cross.

We have to do some adjusting for the next few days; orientation for Next Steps for new people, arranging who will do play days prep, food prep, join next steps, and just getting organized for all the work to be done the next few days

Continue praying for team unity along with working with the staff. It might rain tomorrow and we hope that it clears up so we can go to do play days. Next Steps is also starting tomorrow and pray for our connections and interactions with the clients there.  Don’t know what it is? You’ll have to check in tomorrow to see (and if you can’t wait, dig back in our old blog posts!)