Thursday Recap

Hey everyone back home! Nicole here, and today we kind of switched gears and headed into our first work day with tons of excitement. This year we are partnering with an organization called Riverwood, which is a camp for kids and teens who live in government owned and subsidized housing. The awesome thing is everyone is able to go to this camp entirely for free! The camp holds kids all the way from elementary ages to high schoolers. So after hearing a little bit about the camp and their vision from one of their directors, Dennis, we split up and jumped right into working. Different projects were assigned, which ranged from pulling weeds, mulching, planting and re-planting trees, clearing out fields, cleaning trash up along the shoreline of the lake and cutting/sanding wood, (which will be used for future bunks for campers.) I had the task of working with my team to first dig up some trees and pull some weeds, then switched to re-planting the trees we pulled. While doing this my group had some amazing conversations about our day in the city yesterday and talked about some other ways we have been impacted on this trip, of course while still very hard at work.
At debrief we heard some stories about what other groups saw while working today. There were some really awesome ones that I want to share with you all back home. Tuff was in charge of the boys in the wood shop, and they shared about how when they were all doing different things, it looked like chaos but within the chaos there was organization when they thought about the end product. They compared it to our relationship with Jesus, how when everything looks like chaos to us, all Jesus sees is organization. We heard other stories about how without teamwork, the task at hand would not have been able to be accomplished. In all, our amazing students shared some valuable things they learned today, all while sweating plenty from working so hard.
The rest of the night was spent with some team bonding time in the hotel. It's amazing how much fun this team is having while pretty much doing anything! Tomorrow we are back at Riverwood to start a whole new list of work projects! Bring it on! :)