How does one even explain a 49 hour travel day(s) and our first day on site of ministry? Reality has not yet set in and I continue to feel like Im walking around in a daze. This is finally real and its finally here. I am a current world racer. I am writing a blog from the fieldwhoa. I actually have squatty potties 20 feet from my door and its awesome. The camp we are at is amazing, but more about that later.
Our travel day was mostly uneventful and not awful at all. An eight hour plane ride from Atlanta to Amsterdam and a three hour fifteen minute flight to Istanbul really didn’t seem like much. On our first flight I watched Life of Pi with my seat buddy, slept, watched The Secret Life of Bees which had me sobbing at 1:00 a.m. in the middle of our flight, and the best flight attendants I’ve ever met; they were so nice. The best way I can explain our second flight was I slept the entire time. I stopped to put food in my mouth and fell back asleep before the staff even returned to take our trash. After going through customs and retrieving our bags (and finding out my sleeping pad was no longer attached to mine), we waited for the bus. Our bus ride started at 7:00 p.m. and ended the next day at 10:15 p.m. I either slept or read the entire way, which is what most of the bus did too. We drove through Turkey, Greece, Macedeonia, and Albania making my total country count five already with our stop in Amsterdam. This is truly a world race.
We arrived to our ministry location and trekked a short way with our packs to the camp. We are all sleeping in bunk beds in nice rooms and have nice bathrooms. Our shower heads are over the squatty potties, but as we discussed while showering that first night: these are some of the cleanest bathrooms we’ve ever been in while at a camp. Everyone crashed pretty hard after some showers and organization of packs.
The first morning we were given the luxury of sleeping in until 10:00 a.m., but I was up around 6:00 a.m. There were kids and other squadmates outside playing games, so I joined them. I picked up some Albanian phrases and continued to move around the kids learning names and failing horribly at pronouncing them. The most interesting part of my morning was when I sat down to have my quiet time with the Lord and about 10 minutes later there were 10 kids sitting around me. I couldn’t speak to them and I knew they were waiting for their next activity to start, but I still felt like I should do something with them, but I just looked and smiled at them. We spent most of the time in sessions, orientations, and a debrief time with our leaders for my team. It was a good, chill day. I was really encouraged by our debrief time and learned a lot more about my team and myself.
The camp we are working at is partnered with World Vision, which I personally think is pretty awesome. Our ministry contact, George, is emphatically intense and I kind of love it. He may (unintentionally) offend me later, but for now I am trying to be unoffendable. The camp is unlike any camp I’ve been to and has a great structure built into it. There are lots of activities for the kids and they partake in all of them in a rotation schedule. They have archery, obstacle courses, a playground, a pool, TWO bounce houses, Our teams are partnered with a group of kids and are here to help support the staff and love on the kids. My teams first day was different though because we were put on kitchen/security duty, so we mostly had the day to do whatever we wanted. For me, that included include a nap, shower, blog writing, laundry, and working on some heart issues with the Lord.
