Little House by the Railway Line

Back from camp

I've done a week at camp, and came home late yesterday. Greg's still there, until Friday, and the house feels very empty without him.  It's the first time we've been apart for longer than about 10-15 hours (during a work day) since we got married.  Hopefully I'll be able to phone him later this evening, but it depends what time the children at camp have their hot chocolate, as he has to wash up afterwards and can't get back to the tent till he's done that.

I really enjoyed being at the camp, and it was refreshing to be around children that are, on the whole, well-behaved.  Such a change from the children that come to the Youth Group in the village, who generally seem to have "winding everyone up" as their primary objective.  I think part of the reason it was so pleasant was that all the electronic gadgets had to be handed in, so they had no phones, i-pods, gameboys and so forth.

Cooking for 140 people was an interesting experience.  Far too much stodgy, salt-laden foods - partly because it simply isn't possible for three people to make enough pastry (for example) from scratch for that many, so everything was out of "just add water" mixes, and of course they're full of strange additives.  I'm also not used to having meat three times a day - we generally have it about three times a week at home.  I would have preferred to have more clear ideas about what I was supposed to be doing at a given time, but enjoyed working with the people.  I really enjoyed being with a large group of like-minded Christians working together; every morning we had staff prayers before the campers got up, which I found helpful despite my normal reservations about prayer meetings (I'm hard of hearing, and find it almost impossible to hear prayers in meetings, which tends to leave me feeling a bit like I'm on a different planet to everyone else).  It was encouraging to hear the staff who were actually working alongside the campers talking about the questions the campers were asking and how they were working through their thoughts about Christianity.

The most difficult part of camp was the complete lack of washing facilities.  I think I'll have to get more practiced at washing while squatting on the floor (because the ceiling's too low to stand) in a washing up bowl with a milk bottle full of cold water if we're going to do camp next year.