Update #2: The End of Camp. The End of Summer.

Bullet Points for those who don't want to read all the way through the post:


1) During the 3rd session of camp, I got Malaria. I was sick for almost the whole week, but then got the medication I needed and healed up just fine.
2) During the 4th session of camp, one of my campers was a special needs camper named Vinit who managed to win over the entire camp's love through his hilarious antics.
3) During the 5th session, I co-lead the oldest kids age group with Tyler Fleet (one of the guys who is currently living and working with me). The week started off a little awkwardly but then through a series of unfortunate events, we bonded and went on to win just about as many awards that the camp has to offer.
4) After camp, we all went to the Maasai Mara and safaried it up until we couldn't safari any more.




The actual Post:


We last left our intrepid hero as the final three weeks of camp were quickly approaching. In fact, it was the night before camp that he sent the last update. (Enough third person, our “hero” is ME!) So anyway, I sent that update, and then began the longest stretch of camp of the summer. The kids that came for these sessions of camp (unlike the previous two) were mostly from backgrounds that know slim to none of what the gospel really means. Each week we had a full camp (and two of the weeks we even had extra kids that we squeezed in last minute) and only a few of the kids knew Jesus. It was an incredible time for all the campers and staff as we all learned how God works in our lives. The campers learned through the stories from the Bible that we shared with them every day. The staff learned through all the joy, sorrow, sicknesses, camp-outs, games, annoying kids, kids that were a blessing, arguments, reconciliations, prayer times, worship times, etc. … It was clearly evident how Holy spirit was working in us and through us to share the love of Christ with these kids and each other.

During the third session I was placed with the youngest age group, the Longonots. These kids were wholly dependent on counselors to do everything for them. Maybe not everything, but almost everything. They were 7-9 years old and had the attention span of a dead goldfish. I was thrilled to be their counselor, but I did not know how demanding they would be.

This is where it gets interesting. I had been doing all I could to feed, dress, and generally keep these kids in line when all of a sudden, two days into the week, the incubation period for malaria ended. And entered the … post-incubation period... I don’t know what that’s called, but it was like getting hit by a train and staying on the tracks as it continued to run me over and over for what seemed like an eternity. Monday night, I had just finished doing the luchador skit where I fling myself around and try to get kids to laugh by hurting myself, when I started to feel pretty awful. The fever was beginning to kick in full force and I, not knowing any better, blamed it on being sore from the aforementioned skit. As the evening carried on, I started feeling worse and worse. By the time I got back to the room and got in bed, I was in a bad way. To give you an idea of how bad my fever felt (without using train metaphors) I need to explain that it doesn’t get colder than about 50 degrees Fahrenheit all year round. I was in a 20 degree sleeping bag with blankets on top of it and was still unable to feel warm. I was colder than I’ve ever felt. It got to be so painful that I was afraid my groaning/subtle crying would wake up the kids. I barely slept at all that night, and woke up feeling much the same as I had the evening before. I spent most of Tuesday in the room while the kids were doing all of their activities. But by the time Tuesday evening rolled around, the leadership staff noticed I was sick and didn’t want to worry the kids so they sequestered me into the sickbay (AKA a room away from the campers). It was there that I spent the remainder of the week. On Wed they took me to the clinic to get my blood tested where they told me that I had Malaria and gave me the medication to get rid of it. From that point on all I did was stay in the room watching movies on my laptop and try to recuperate.

It’s funny how I started out the week babying kids who needed other people to do everything for them and finished the week as one wholly dependent on others. God decided to pull the “ol’ switcheroo” on me and let me know that I need him more than those kids ever needed me.
Other than that, I don’t remember too much of third session. It was really just a blur of pain and healing. But I learned a lot.

Session four brings us to the penultimate week of camp. The time when we as a staff had two paths in front of us. One path led to happier campers, more energetic skits and games, and incredibly worn out camp counselors who still had one more week of camp ahead of them where they would do the same. The other path led to a pretty decent week of camp with fun and games and a generally lackadaisical attitude throughout all of camp staff followed by another week of the same. I can’t give you everyone’s experience, but I might be able to fill you in on which path we chose by explaining what happened to me.

For this session I was placed with the Lengai, which is the second time I was placed with this age group. These kids are one step above the Longonots and have developed enough to know how to put on their clothes and even where their clothes are in their suitcases. But they also have garnered themselves a little bit more energy than any person could ever need. Coming off of a week with Malaria, I wasn’t exactly in the best shape to keep up with the delightful little tykes. However, I was not the only counselor in the cabin this week since we had a massive amount of girls sign up and barley any boys. There was such a shortage of boys that we had three counselors in one cabin with ten boys. The cabins weren’t too big, but neither were the boys, so although it was cramped, it wasn’t terrible living conditions. We had so many in one cabin because there was a bit of a mix up in the signing up process and one unfortunately named young man had been placed in girls camp (a problem that was quickly remedied upon his arrival) as well as having a last minute addition of a certain Vinit Patel.

Vinit warrants his own paragraph and so I will give him one. We were told about him the morning he showed up when his parents quickly signed him up after being told that a spot had opened up due to someone not being able to make it and furthermore noticing that he would not be the only child with special needs at camp. Cheryl, who had Down’s Syndrome, was also at camp this week. Vinit, we were told, didn’t have Down’s, but rather a chromosome disorder that gave him the same appearance and someone with Down’s. He was placed in my cabin because, although he was 13 and should be in the next age group, he was in the same year at school as the younger kids. When I first met him, I was a little scared of how the week would go. I’ve never had experience caring for kids with his needs before. I just got off of a week with kids who needed meticulous supervision and was not feeling up to the challenge again (especially having been so recently sick). How would he interact with the other kids? Would they pick on him relentlessly? How would he participate in the rest of camp? Would he want to play the games? If he doesn’t will I have to sit with him the whole time? Am I going to be able to concentrate on any of the other kids, or will my focus be only of Vinit? etc.... I’m sorry to admit that most of the thoughts included in the “etc.” became pretty selfish after a while. I was a little resentful that he was placed in my cabin. Anyway, Vinit showed up late Sunday night (the first night of camp) after all the other kids had showed up because his parents had to go pick him up and drive back. I went to meet him and was greeted by one of the happiest I had ever been introduced to. He had a great big smile and was incredibly excited to be at camp. I took him to the room and introduced him to the other kids and our cabin was finally assembled for the week.

That was a long paragraph for one kid, but he managed to single handedly change the course of the week. The first day of camp wrapped up with all the kids signing up for the activities they would be doing all week and everyone headed to bed. We made all the kids get ready for bed and Vinit proved capable enough to accomplish the whole ordeal by himself, but it took quite awhile. That was the first indicator of how the week would go: slow but generally happy. The kids seemed to welcome him pretty well, and one of them even had a cousin with Down’s and was good at talking with him when no one else was really listening to him. The next day at skills (the activities the kids do all week), Vinit basically sat on the side of each skill watching the other kids play the games when they were too physically demanding, but received plenty of attention from which ever counselor was close at the time, so he sat contentedly. Lunch was another indicator of the tempo of the week as Vinit had to be encouraged to eat more with every bite. It’s not that he wasn’t hungry, it’s just that the kid ate slower than anyone I’ve ever met. He always had to take food with him when he left meals. After lunch is when I started to notice that the kids were starting to make fun of him. One kid in particular would notice when he was doing something particularly silly and bring the other kids in from outside to laugh at him. I have to admit that I didn’t like that kid too much. He was such a little suck up. I was a bit mean to him from that point on. I called him out on making fun of Vinit and from then on he became Vinit’s defender making up lies about other kids and tattling on them so that I would get them in trouble too. The kid was a snot. As the week went on, we learned better how to deal with Vinit’s eating habits and the other kids learned to appreciate Vinit’s silliness without making fun of him and life went pretty smoothly. Unfortunately, it wasn’t completely smooth.

Vinit did have some issues with not getting his way as do all people, but his reaction was a bit more flagrant than others. I had to tell him to stop throwing water in people’s faces during one of the games and told him if he did it again he wouldn’t be allowed to play. After that, I became “the mean one” and a child who loved everyone he met didn’t love met. Which meant that whenever I talked to him he would ignore me and not do anything I said. Thankfully, since there were two other counselors with me that week, I let them take over for awhile and was able to get to know the other kids better. (Side note: If Corbin and Wes hadn’t been in that cabin with me I would have lost it. Those guys backed me up and prayed for me and with me and were a huge encouragement the whole time.) By the time Thursday rolled around, Vinit was talking with me again and I was noticing positive changes in the other kids. They were able to take the weird jokes and comments that Vinit made and participate with him. He really did say some crazy things, so I was really proud of the kids when they took it in stride and let him be himself. Even “the little snot” was beginning to stop being such a suck up all the time and I started to realize that my grudge against this kid was foolish and stupid. My anger blinded me to the fact that I’m not there to make the kids better people over the course of the week. I’m there to love them with the love of Christ even when they’re being little snots ‘cause Christ loved me first. He didn’t wait for me to be a better person. So what right do I have to begrudge that kid? It was an insightful and painful moment when I realized I was being a jerk to a kid that was supposed to be learning who Jesus is from me.
By the end of the week, everyone in camp knew who Vinit was and all of the staff fell in love with the kid. He even managed to emcee the awards ceremony (basically paper plate awards). He was one of the most challenging kids I had to deal with, but he was also one of my favorites.

As the fourth session finished up, my spirits started to lift as we approached the final week of camp. Don’t get me wrong, I loved camp, but it was time for it to end. I was tired and we had been going non stop all summer. Even the time inbetween sessions we managed to fill up with non-stop activity like what I already told you about in the previous update. So when Amanda, the camp director, told me that I was going to be with Kilimanjaro, the oldest kids age group for the final and fifth session, I was ready for kids who could dress themselves and the varied activities that come with that group.

The Kili (short for Kilimanjaro) guys get to experience a completely different side of camp. Rather than playing all the games and singing all the songs that the littlest kids get to participate in, they play on high ropes courses and climb mountains and go caving and camping. There is a much more relaxed feel to the whole week than the rest of camp’s activities. In other words, it was exactly the week I needed.

The guys showed up on Sunday, awkwardly stood around saying goodbye to their parents and then Tyler, who co-led the week with me, and I showed them around camp and began to teach them what sarcasm was. (Coming from the international culture, some of them had to adjust to our American witticisms.) We had a cabin full with 12 high school guys, 7 of whom were of Hindu and Jain backgrounds and 5 who were from nominally Christian backgrounds. The guys didn’t exactly jump head first into camp. It took our first high ropes course that night before things started running smoothly. But after they got to know each other and us a bit better we were able to get a long swimmingly. The next day we did some more ropes course stuff, rock climbing at the nearby cliff face, and then played some of the camp games with the younger kids, but the week didn’t really begin until Tuesday when we started on our three day trip.

We joined up with Andrew Conway (the leader of our expedition and one of the guys I live with now) and left pretty early to drive to Mount Suswa, so we could have enough time to explore the cave system throughout the mountain. It was a four hour drive through the Kenyan country side, which changes quickly from lush mountainside to barren plains. The last hour of our trek was spent on the worst path I have ever been on. There was no other way to get to the campsite, so we had to grin and bear it as we drove over the rockiest, most uncomfortably bumpy ride of my life. The campsite turned out to be right next to the entrance of the caves, so we quick set up camp and headed on into the volcanic tunnels.

The tunnels were an intricate system of over 70 caverns, some of which were connected and we were able to rappel into  in order to continue exploring. The caves were amazing. The Maasai guides who led us through them told us that National Geographic had done a special on them and had been through the very same caves we went through. They also told us about the animals that live in them at night. One portion of the caves has an open roof where it caved in long ago. Piles of rocks are scattered everywhere and some huge tree roots have descended into the cave from the opening. Those crazy baboons having been going there for so long that all the rocks have been rubbed smooth and shiny from their butts. It’s simultaneously really cool and really gross. The baboons will only go so far into the cave because leopards will take their kills into the deeper portions of the caves to keep the food for themselves. But even the leopards won’t go too far back because the bats live really far in the cave and they really know how to keep anything out. I don’t mean to be too crude, but the stench that they create is one of the worst things that I have ever smelled. We got into their section and the entire floor of the cave was covered in about five inches of what appeared to be fluffy dust. In actuality it was just guano. It was gross. We only had to crawl on it on our hands and knees twice though, so it wasn’t too disgusting...

After the caves that day, we got back to camp and were throwing the frisbee, or something carefree like that, when we started to see storm clouds rolling up on us. In our expert knowledge of meteorology, specifically in the Kenyan setting, we determined that the storm would be a minor inconvenience and ultimately amount to a mere sprinkle. Unbeknownst to us, this storm would forever change the course of the week. The storm began as a light frosting of rain and smoothly graduated to a torrential downpour of large rain drops and even bigger pieces of hail that could rival marbles. The sky continued to wage war on our meager tents for the next hour. The hail cut out a bit sooner than the rain, but its point was made five minutes after it decided to join the party. Since the ground we were on was basically a giant rock do to the fact that we were on a mountain, the rain refused to go into the ground through any route other than the caves. As all the high schoolers sat in the tents not knowing what to do, Tyler, Andrew, and I ran around putting all the gear we could into the vehicles (and also not knowing what to do). As the rain continued the kids realized that the it was seeping through the tents and our homes for the night were ruined. By that time the ground had turned into 2-3 inches of running water sweeping through our campsite with various pools filled with 2 inches of hail and making this experience that much colder. (At this point you might be thinking, “Wait a second, Bryce. You live in Kenya. It doesn’t get cold in Kenya. Even in the middle of winter it doesn’t get under 50 degrees and night.” Well I’m going to let you in on a secret about Kenyan weather: much like Lady Gaga’s poker face, you cannot read it.) Fortunately, one of our tents was new enough to have a decent ground tarp that held the water out and for some providential reason Andrew had neglected to set his tent up before we went to the cave. So when the rain finally stopped and drained down into the earth, we started making plans for optimal sleeping arrangements. For a while, we were planing on sleeping in the caves to get into a dry area, but is was so dusty that we decided to rough it on the outside.

(I feel the need to interrupt this narrative in order say that this whole time, the guys and girls on the trip spent this whole time laughing and carrying on as if there was no way this storm could get there spirits down. All the guys had piled into our bus and were waiting out, and the girls were in the nice tent that manged better in the storm. Overall, they were awesome campers.)

One of the other issues we were facing was that this storm happened at about 5:00pm and stopped at about 6:30pm giving the kids and us plenty of the rest of the day to think about how cold and wet we were. As we were still standing around trying to make plans for the next few hours before sleep, the Maasai guides, who had been wisely waiting out the weather in the caves, pitied us and offered their assistance in starting a fire. Not thinking it possible to start a fire in these conditions we doubtfully, but gratefully accepted their offer. By the time my clothing finished drying beside the blazing fire, I began to realize that my doubts of the fire building capabilities of the Maasai were ridiculous. They created a roaring flame from rain soaked wood and plastic hotdog wrappings. It was incredible to watch and even more incredible to feel warmth after resigning ourselves to a miserably cold evening. We sat around that campfire until about 10:30 just talking about what had happened. It was probably the best bonding experience that God could have sent our way.

The rest of the trip went without a hitch. We did more cave exploring the next day, then drove on to the next campsite which was right beside a hippo infested lake. I saw four wild hippo that night. Those things are surprisingly graceful. They had an electric fence keeping them out of the campsite, so we were able to stand on one side of it as they grazed along the waterfront. Looking at them, you’d hardly believe that they were the number one man killer in the world. They look like giant pigs with bigger faces. Thursday morning, we went to Mount Longonot for a 3 hour hike up to the rim, and then made our way back to Lukenya.

Thursday night is when we gave the more in-depth gospel message and the solo time for the campers to think about the week and who God is. The questions the guys had that night made it clear that God was working in their hearts. We didn’t have anyone profess new faith, but seeds were planted and God’s word was proclaimed. Talking with the guys that night was pretty scary. They asked some hard hitting questions that I certainly couldn’t answer with fully satisfying responses. Most of them were Hindu or Jain, and the Christians seemed full of questions too, so Tyler and I gave what we thought were correct answers while praying that the Holy Spirit was supplying inspiration. It was an intimidating conversation. The guys were very open and honest about what they believed and weren’t afraid to ask questions, even in a large group setting like we had.

Friday, the last full day, the guys jumped all the way into the camp activities and ran around camp enjoying life and being loud. They made such an impression that during the closing ceremony the next day when their parents came to pick them up, they won the award for best mountain group (age group). Normally it goes to the younger kids who are around camp the whole week. That session was the only one to have the oldest age group win. They were a great group of guys. They loved camp and made it an enjoyable time for everyone around them. Part of the cool part of my new ministry here is that I get to keep up with those guys and build stronger relationships.

Thus ended my first Camp Blue Sky summer. At least that ended the camp portion. The summer staff had a few more days, so we hired some safari vans and drove down to the Maasai Mara for a few days of reveling in the glory of God’s creation. But words can’t even describe what that trip was like. Luckily, I have over 2,500 pictures of the trip, so if you want more than words just ask and I’ll show you. I’ve never seen so many animals in my life.

After we got back from the Mara, all the summer staff loaded into their respective planes and headed on back to the states for a little R&R before school started back up. Ever since then, we full timers have been adjusting to Kenyan life and planning kick offs for our high school and middle school ministries. God is moving in great ways here in Nairobi. He’s opened many doors for us to spread his Word and share his love. But I’ll write more of that later, this is already too long.

Warmly,

Bryce