The Q Chronicles Online: G.Hope Street Camp 09, Pt. 2

On Friday, July 31, Germantown Hope Street Camp held its Closing Ceremony at G.Hope church building. After four weeks, camp was over. Here's the slide-show of pics from camp that I showed at the Ceremony:

G.Hope Street Camp 09 slideshow from Germantown Hope on Vimeo.

And here are pics from week 3 and pics from week 4. (See previous post for links to weeks 1 and 2.)

I hope you can see from the pics that it was a lot of fun and full of life. I said previously that it was probably the best camp that we'd had so far; and it was.

Gateway 09 team with friends

We had a wonderful team of enthusiastic leaders who bonded well and made it a great pleasure to work with. (Shout-out: Gateway, you were fabulous!)

We added some new fun activities that worked really well (like afternoon dance parties, "Ride the Ducks" field trip, photo scavenger hunts, and find-the-counselor in the park) to the old favorites (watermelon fest, water days, atooteetah--sorry, can't explain via blog post, you'll just have to experience it for it yourself--and, of course, the Closing Ceremony when we show the slide-show).
A seminary intern from Calvin Theological Seminary, Andy Hanson, was with us for a whole month away from his family, and served ably as assistant camp director--he allowed me to function without burning out.

Andy with Man Man

Plus, we got an overnight training for all the different volunteer teams (Gateway team of college student interns who are mainly responsible for the main camp activities; a short-term team from Main Line Chinese Christian Church in Maryland; another team from Ashland Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Voorhees, NJ; and Jr. Counselors from the neighborhood, some of whom were campers just last year) at Ashland EPC that helped to prepare and bond everyone before the camp got started.

Ken gets cooled down

Ashland's youth group, pastored by a former student and now partner in ministry, Ken Buck, came up big as a suburban church partner with us in the ministry. Not only did they come over as a team of energetic and enthusiastic (if somewhat zany--ahem, Ken) leaders, they supplied the counselors' t-shirts, donated various supplies, and even held a pancake breakfast to raise money for the camp, most of which helped to lower the costs for campers going on the Ride the Ducks field trip.
Witnessing the Jr. Counselors mature was a joy for me personally. They were asked to take part in every daily pre-camp meetings and daily debriefing meetings--this meant they had to be at church by 8:30 in the morning, and didn't get to go home until 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon--a long day for young people. A few of them missed the pre-camp training and had to earn their Jr. Counselor status by working as "Leaders-in-training" for a full work week. Then, we presented them with their "red shirts" together with affirmations and encouragement from the whole leadership team. They responded to this really positively. My dream is that these young people would become, in a few years, "resident camp experts" who could lead and teach newcomers about how things are supposed to go at G.Hope St. Camp... part of our overall vision for indigenous leadership development.

Camp wasn't all fun and games, though. There were also some very hard things.

When you do ministry, you get to know people, and we got to know some pretty hard things about the campers' family lives. Our hearts broke over their hurts and hardships, and we pray that the Father will look after them and rescue them from all their troubles.
Andy, our intern, had to rush home back to Michigan a week earlier than planned because his father was in a biking accident and suffered a head trauma. (Thankfully, he wasn't as badly hurt as initially feared; he was discharged from the hospital in a couple of days.)
The free lunches that we receive from the City of Philadelphia's Recreation Dept. didn't end up coming three days--they couldn't adjust to some changes we requested, messed up the paperwork and then made us feel like we were the ones who did wrong. So we had to rush over to shop groceries and make sandwiches for fifty or so hungry kids three days--these didn't result in the most stress-free camp days.

By the time we wrapped up camp and concluded the Closing Ceremony, we could only marvel at the experience that we'd shared for four weeks--counselors, jr. counselors, campers--and praise God for a wonderful time. Gateway team members headed home the next day, the short-termers were back to "normal" life already, and so were our neighborhood jr. counselors and campers. Bittersweet. I saw a few Facebook statuses of the camp leaders that basically said, "Don't know what to do with myself away from Germantown."