Camp Day 7 – All-Nighter

Today was the last full day of camp.  We leave tomorrow.  It’s been an awesome week, but we’ll all be sad to go. In class we let the students decide what we’d cover so it was pretty enjoyable.  We talked about American life and what goes on in a typical day for us.  We let them ask us any questions they wanted about Americans and they seemed to enjoy it.  We also shared with them some typical slang words that you’d find us saying.  We took the rest of class and played Pictionary.  This was a lot of fun.  They thought I must play it all the time because I was really good.  I think it might have had to do with that fact that my English vocab is a little bit more extensive, but I told them I was just a good guesser.

Today is the day of the ‘official’ Czech vs. American soccer game, but the earlier game was quite a bit more hyped up.  The Czech’s had all their best players in, and by this time most of the Americans were either too sick or tired so we didn’t have everyone involved. We got Ondra and Martin (a Czech student and phenomenal soccer player from my class) on our team to help us out. We still managed to lose 7-1.  It was pretty bad.  We had fun, but it was a bit embarrassing to lose that badly.

Tonight’s IceBreaker was a massive game of Ninja.  Ninja was probably the most popular game all week.  The beauty of it is it requires nothing but people and very little explanation.  What happens is a group of people get in a circle and start out in a ninja pose.  The players go around the circle one at a time attempting to slap (ninja chop) the hand of a near by person.  The defender has one move to attempt not to get hit and then must freeze until it is their turn to attack again or are attacked.  Once your hand is slapped you are out.  Last remaining ninja is the victor.  The Czechs seemed to love it, and we found ourselves playing it just about everywhere.

During our song\worship time Brent translated God of this City for the Czechs letting them know why we sing the song.  He told them that if they believed it to sing along with them.

You’re the God of this City

You’re the King of these people

You’re the Lord of this nation

While he sang many of the Americans gathered at the back of the room and we stood with our hand on each others shoulders and some with hands lifted high in worship. Our song and our prayer is that the Czechs will realize that God is still King and Lord of their country despite the fact that the previous Communist government attempted to eradicated Christianity from the country.

Tim and Dean gave their testimonies tonight and the Czech team put on a skit showing the power of Christ over sin.

Our discussion group was more just asking and answering questions getting the students to think more deeply about faith. A couple of our students said that it’s been a lot to take in this week and they are going to continue thinking about all that we talked about.  Many of them grabbed a bible this week so I pray that they read it and that they see God.  One of the girls Barca was very excited to have her new bible and has already started reading  it.

The last night of camp always ends with a Bon-fire where we roast sausages and make s’mores.  The sausages are usually amazing, but this year they were unfortunately pretty uneatable.  The s’mores however were of course great and the Czechs very much enjoyed them. I had to play guard duty over the ingredients because some people were attempting to eat more then their fair share.

The last night usually goes just about all night.  The stairwell is lined with papers with each student’s name and everyone writes notes of encouragement to each other.  We have to tape multiple sheets together as they get filled up.  Many students try and stay up all night, those that fail to stay away in public areas get marker written on them.  I started writing on the sheets after I came in from the bon-fire and by the time I was done I managed to be the last American standing.  Not sure how I outlasted all of our students, but then again I am a night-owl so I suppose it just comes naturally.

Camp Day 6 – “Day Light Savings”

Today’s our Day Light Savings day, which means we get to sleep in an extra hour.  It’s not actually daylight savings, we just call it that to let the students get extra rest after the hike.  Most of the students are pretty cashed so it helps give them make it through the last couple days.

That hour has to come from somewhere so everything is somewhat pushed back, so classes are shortened a bit.  We took some of class time to take the camp and class pictures, so we had even less time.  Because of the shortened class we did an activity with articles and another on asking questions, then played some Apples t o Apples.  This is always fun because it gives us a chance to teach them a little bit about American culture.

After lunch the Americans had a meeting and Tim gave the team some encouragement that I think was very needed.  We talked about how we are here to sow the seed and not necessarily water or see the plant event grow. Some would hear that and not think of it as encouragement, but for us that’s helpful because we may not see the change while we’re here.  Many of the Czech students here have never been around Christians much less heard the gospel.  It would be like meeting someone, then spending a couple hours a day with them for five days and slowly introducing your life and the gospel to them.  That sort of thing just doesn’t take 5 days, it takes a steady relationship.  Our goal is to get them connected to the church and Czech Christians so they can water what we’ve sewn. So our prayer is that they take steps towards God, maybe even just start believing in God, but most importantly that they know that there are Christians and a church that they can be a part of.  This messages is on the day that Tim is sharing the Gospel so it’s timely to use especially since many of our students have been discouraged that their small groups we’re going that great or that people hadn’t made any decisions for Christ yet.

Many of the students took some much needed naps after our meeting and some even slept right through sports time.  That was ok since sports wasn’t with our teams today, we gave the students the option to play which ever sport they wanted.  We had a game of American Football, Baseball, Volleyball,  and Ultimate Frisbee.

For our Icebreaker tonight (Activity before our evening program) we played a game called Buck Buck.  Apparently it’s pretty popular in the states with Youth Groups but I’ve never seen it done.  What happens is you get two teams of people and they all squat and huddle up kind of sitting on each others knees all in a row (that’s a lousy explanation but it’s the best I can do, see pictures below). And someone from the other team runs and vaults on top of the pile of people attempting to stay on.  The more people your team gets on without someone falling off the better.  It’s quite hilarious to watch.  It’s typically done with just guys but some of the girls setup their own game.  It was a blast.

Tonight was the climax in Tim’s stories.  Tim gave the gospel message and several Czech students shared their testimonies. Tim shared the story of Nicodemus and how Jesus told him it wasn’t about what he did but that he be born again through Jesus.

Because my discussion group shared the gospel two nights before we tried to center our questions on objections or questions they may have about Christianity.  We asked the students where they would go when they died and what would happen to those that were bad, and how bad would you have to be to go their.  Most of these questions the students had never thought of.  No one ever asked them, and it never occurred to them to even wonder about these things.  This blows my mind that questions like this never get talked about here.  We had a good discussion and it all was a lot for the students to take in.

Our hope is the students won’t make an emotional decision about this message but a rational one, so now that the message has been delivered our prayer is that the students really keep it all in mind and get connected with other Christians and with Elim to get further discipled.

After our discussion time we have a Tea House where the students come down and enjoy some good tea and conversations.  Here many of the students continue the discussions we’ve been having all week, just on a more one on one basis.  As I looked around the room I was so proud of both our students and the Czech team, they were quite spread out and really taking advantage of this chance to further pour into these students.

I’m planning on writing a post on our team and bragging about all that God has done through each and everyone of them, I really am impressed with how far they’ve all come this week.

Camp Day 5 – Hike Day

I asked earlier in the week if anyone wanted to write one of the blogs and Lauren Downey was the only volunteer so here is her take on today:

To sum up today in a few words, it would be: bugs, sweat, pain, DANCING!! We went on a ten mile hike to a castle and it was 5 hours. Carly got sick and had to go back, she hasn’t been feeling well, keep her lifted up in prayer. It was very exhausting.  We spent a few hours there and then hiked back. It was a great time to talk to Czech students and just have the time to talk with out going all the time.

We got back and everyone sprinted to the showers and waited in line to get  nice, cool, and clean. The evening  program was more about forgiveness and that anyone can be forgiven for anything.  We watched a little clip of Les Miserables to show forgiveness even to people that maybe shouldn’t. Small  groups were a little rough tonight. The teenagers on the team are feeling spiritual warfare at it’s best tonight. Keep us in your prayers as we are facing that.

The best part of the day was the talent show! Many students got to show off their best skills. There was dancing, karate, singing, laughing, crying, falling and so much more. The American students did a choreographed dance. We rocked the whole talent show! But really, it was a lot of fun and the Czechs loved to see us come out of their shell and to see how Christians can have fun and not be just up tight.

–Lauren!

As Lauren stated we had both the hike and the talent show today, so it was rather full and tiring. Classes were shortened because of the hike and there was no sports today.  Most of the classes play games because it’s hard to get into anything else.

This year a few of us decided to actually take the tour in the castle.  It was pretty sweet seeing all the ancient relics and the architecture from different periods of time, since it was renovated over many centuries.  In the words of Dean, “That was the best 70Kc (equivalent of $3.50) I’ve spent.”

Carly is unfortunately one of many students (Czech and American) that have gotten sick this trip.  Dean wasn’t feeling well after hike either.  So you can definitely be in prayer for all of us for that.  The spiritual warfare should go without mention, that is guaranteed to happen in a setting li ke this.  Our God is stronger and will overcome it.  We just have to make sure we’re relying on that strength because we can’t overcome it, so that is another prayer request.

Megan and my group went fairly well (a talk Tim gave on the actual day I’m writing this put this in perspective, I’ll explain more about it tomorrow).  Tim’s talk tonight was on David and Bathsheba so the them was how God can (and will) forgive anything.  So we centered our discussion on sin, it’s consequences and how God forgives all.  Many of the students could relate to David (which was the point) in how he had everything and yet he still wanted more of something he shouldn’t have.

The talent show (variety show is a better name considering the lack of talent) was a blast.  All the students did a great job.  The American students were definitely the most prepared considering they’ve been practicing for many months.  I have video and I’ll share it once I get home (it would take an eternity to upload it here).

Tomorrow the gospel will be presented so that is a huge prayer request (at the point of you reading this the gospel message is still hopefully on their mind so still pray for this).

Camp Day 3 – American vs Czech Soccer scrimmage

We’ve had to tweak our lessons a little bit more as we’ve learned how much English they already know.  All of the students in our class seem to be at the same level, including our translator Lenka.  They manage to translate for each other fairly well and what they don’t know as a group we look up.  We’ve had to resort to more writing and conversations because that is where they need to most work.  We talked about family and gender roles in the Czech and how the differentiate from the US. We also played some Scatergories which I learned last year they enjoy a lot and it’s a game that they can easily play.

Today during free time we did an American vs Czech Soccer scrimmage game, although come to find out many of the American students thought it was the real game.  The real game is officially played on Friday during sports time.  The pictures below will show how much enthusiasm the Americans showed towards the game, perhaps too much considering it was just a practice game.  We all wore the Tie-Die shirts that Claire Chlasta and Lauren Downey made as well as an American Flag bandanna.  We started the game off with the Start Spangled Banner followed by the Czech’s equivalent song.

The game that followed was the Czechs revenge for not making it into the World Cup.  We actually played really really well, and I think if we hadn’t made a couple major blunders could have tied the game.  Dean was playing keeper and was away from the net a bit and missed grabbing the ball. Reid trying to stop the ball accidently kicked the ball into the goal…  Another blunder involved the Czech goalie trying to fall on the ball and it got loose.  Brandon Shadon had a completely open goal 5 feet out and he missed…  The final score was 4-2, both of our goals were scored by Carly Fuehring.  We looked good out there and I think we all were proud despite our loss, and most importantly we had a blast doing it.  We’ll show them some more of our skills on Friday.

Tim’s story tonight focused on what forgiveness is and how it redeems not only the person being forgiven but the person doing the forgiving as well. The story was about a boy who’s father was an alcoholic.  One night the father had a little to much to drink and insisted on driving.  The man’s wife was with him and they got in an accident.  The mother was killed instantly and the man was barely harmed.  I won’t give away the ending but instead you can watch it here yourself.

The video was very emotional and led to great discussion during small group time.  I think the Czech students really got a better understanding of how important forgiveness really is.  Many of my students were really open about situations in their past that they either had to forgive or needed to forgive someone for something in order for redemption for themselves. It was very encouraging to see many of the students make that connection and I’m excited to see what further steps they take this week.

Camp Day 2 – First Full Day

Wifi is very sketchy here and no one knows where the access point is located so I can’t fix it!  The internet goes down for days at a time so the blog updates won’t be in a timely manor.

Today was our first day of classes and we all made some last minute adjustments to our lessons to fit the level of students we ended up with.  We have to prepare more general lessons ahead of time since we didn’t know the English level of our students until yesterday.  Some of us have to scrap everything just so they’ll learn something from what we teach them.  If they’re too advanced most of the lessons won’t do much good they just need practice conversing, on the other hand if the students have never learned a lick of English then you have to start with the basics.

I will be co-teaching with Megan and we have one of the more advanced intermediate classes.  Which means they can converse fairly well but have trouble with grammar.  Words aren’t always in the right place and they don’t always make words plural like they should.  Their V’s sound like W’s and TH sounds like D’s, so that has to be practiced.  This is where my English Major comes in handy.

We try to make the activities more fun then they would have in school, so we’re usually mixing a game with the lessons.  Today was more of a get to know you day so we did things like a life timelines and 2 truths and a lie just to learn more about them and their backgrounds.  They had fun with it and I think we accomplished our goal of getting to know them .  It also helped us gauge what to teach later.

Today was also our first day of sports.  Peter’s the head of our sports team and we planned to have four sports each day and the teams just rotate between the sports.  We do it this way because it’s 8 teams and they play each sport for about a half hour.  This way if you don’t like the sport (typically the Czech girls) you won’t be doing it for long.

The theme at camp this week is Redeem.  The idea behind it is that anybody can be redeemed from anything.  Tim’s talks on the theme are designed to start with basic ideas of the gospel and then build on them to give you the whole picture.  Because many Czechs don’t have a concept of God much less the gospel, it has to be told as basic as possible. Tim had stories of lives being saved from peril and how the people in his story were redeemed.

After Tim talks we get together with our English class for a small group time.  We ask questions that get the students to talk about spiritual concepts, and slowly introduce God and the gospel into the conversations.  Our conversation went very well with our students and they actually wanted more questions.  That had a lot to say and were willing to say more which is really encouraging.  Tomorrow night we’ll talk about forgiveness and I hope that will go as well.

First Day of Camp

Camp starts today!  We got an opportunity to sleep in today because we weren’t being picked up till 11:30 to go to camp. We were to eat a late breakfast and then we met as a team one last time before camp.

The bus ride from Pisek to camp is a bit treacherous so we had anyone who might be prone to motion sickness in the front.  Luckily we didn’t have anyone get too sick.

Once we get to camp we have a short time before all the students will arrive.  Unfortunately the camp was not in the condition that Ondra was hoping for.  There are quite a few things he had asked them to get done that they neglected so he was pretty upset.  Despite that we start getting everything together and ready for the students.

As the students arrive each one is tested so we get an idea of what their English level is at.  Those of us that have been here before get a chance to catch up with friends.  Those of us that aren’t doing the English testing are tasked with welcoming the students and helping them carry their things to the rooms.  A couple of our students start a game of volleyball and we setup a four square game too.  This is always popular because it’s easy for us to explain and gives us a good chance to strike up conversation in line.

The soccer field looks like it has recently seen a sickle (yes that’s right no lawn mower) because there are huge clumps of grass all over it making it impossible to play on.  Some of our students grab some rakes and start cleaning up the mess so the soccer field is usable.  Many others join in and they make good work of it. This was one of the many things Ondra was upset about.

Once all the students were settled in it was time for dinner.  Dinner was about a half hour late and their wasn’t enough for everyone.  Most of us didn’t mind but once again Ondra wasn’t happy about it.

After dinner we have some free time, and then we get together for our evening program  Being the first night we had to teach the camp song and show them the moves that go along with it.  This is always a lot of fun for the students and they really get into it. The band did some other camp favorites as well.

Once we were done singing and listening to Tim’s story we got to get together with our English classes for the first time.  This begins with the American team being introduced and we get to call out the students that are in our class.  We had our first time students call them out since they struggle with the names more.  The Czechs find it funny so it’s all good fun. We met with our students for the first time (I’ll tell you more about them after our first class) and then had some ice cream sundaes.

I’m looking forward to getting to know my students and the spiritual discussions we’ll have after the evening programs.

Calm before the storm

We have clouds rolling in this morning and we can already hear the thunder.

Yesterday we had the chance to relax and make finishing touches on our plans for camp. We had a slow morning taking the time to meet a little bit longer as a team and fill the students in on what the camp schedule will be.  After our meeting we split up for lunch both groups ending up at Italian Pizza places, so much for experiencing Czech food…   After lunch we all met up for Gelato, a treat that many of the students enjoy several times a day.

We had a meeting around 3 with the Czech team.  Prior to that most of students spent some time walking through town.  At the meeting we did your typical icebreaker. Sharing names and something people would remember us by, you know, “I like soccer” (football in Czech), “I make funny animal noises,” things of that sort.  We got in small groups mixing Czechs with Americans an shared our story of how came to know Christ and what we wanted prayer for the most at camp, and we followed that up with praying for each other.  Tim and Ondra challenged us to reach out that first day and learn some names and start some friendships.  We split up in our cohort teams meeting with the Czechs halves of our team for the first time.

We broke for dinner, and then hung out in the gym.  A bit of ping pong, basketball, soccer, and even finger rockets.  One of the many ideas we’ve left the Czechs with in previous years.  After leaving the church we of course had to get more gelato.  We spent the rest of the evening hanging out by the fountain and relaxing in our hotels.

Full Day of Travel

We have arrived safely and with everything.

Our travel consisted of a 7 hour flight from Chicago to London, which most of the students and adults were able to sleep for. I took advantage of the movie selections and watched three!  We had a 5-hour layover in London which was spent getting lunch and napping.  Out next leg of the journey was about an hour and forty five minutes safely getting us to Prague.

We changed the trip slightly from past years, usually once arriving in Prague we’d stay in a hotel here and travel to Pisek in the morning.  We opted to make the travel now and have one less transfer from hotel to hotel.  This was also decided on because of the experience we had in a hostel in Prague last year.  I won’t go into the details of that stay but we’ll just say it was a less than ideal situation for the students.

As I sit in the hotel Bila Ruze in Pisek I know that this was certainly the best route to go.  It gives us much more time to settle in and get use to the time change and pace not having to make that extra transfer.  Makes for a lot of travel all at once, but it’s worth it now.

We’ll spend today getting to know the Czech team that we’ll be working with at camp and going over the plans with our cohorts.  I’m part of the sports team so we’ll make sure the plans we came up align with what the Czech team wants to see happen and make adjustments as necessary.  Our hope here is for the Czech team to take on some more leadership here so we can help develop them more in this area.  In the past the Americans have done more of the planning and running of these activities (sports, icebreakers, late-night activities, etc.).

Line of the day:  Maddie: Peter, nobody wants to go running.  (said after the silence of Peter asking who wants to go running with him).

Here’s the team adjusting to the jet lag:

Great team or what!?

If this doesn’t give you an idea of how awesome and creative our team is I don’t know what will!

T-Minus 5 Days

Czech Youth Camp 2010 here we come!  The team is so excited and ready to go.  We’re really impressed so far with the way the team has bonded and how much they have prepared.  We’re looking forward to see how God uses all of us, as well as how he changes us.  For any that are Facebook friends with anyone going on the trip I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of the enthusiasm this team has.

For those that don’t know or don’t remember last year I blogged on our Czech Trip\Honeymoon.  I’ll be doing the same this year minus the honeymoon unfortunately.  I’m sure there will be some great stories and pictures to share again this year as the team is truly quite unique and the Czech’s are exciting to tell about as well.  I hope you all enjoy following along, and thanks ahead of time.