Rainy Nights and Mondays - Trinidad Style!

Monday has been the toughest camp day for me both times we have been to Trinidad.  The first few days go great because of the excitement over being in a new place and we are just with our team members and the wonderful Singh family.  But then the campers come on Sunday, and things change.  If we were not traveling with our own children, Monday might not hit me so hard.  But that's been the day both times when I worry about our children and how they are fitting in ... or not.

This time was a stretch for me because Joy and I were not together.  Last time I was a counselor, so we were together the whole time.  This provided its own challenges and struggles as I sought to balance meeting her needs (which seemed to be greater than normal) and wanting to have time to focus on the Trini-campers God had brought to my cabin.

I thought this year would be easier because I was not going to be a counselor.  But that also meant trusting Joy's well being to someone other than myself and being apart from her.  That was hard for me in general, and Monday was the hardest day of all.  She came and told me she wanted to be in a different cabin for reasons that were fairly trivial.  I'm not sure if I would have pursued this possibility harder if we had the room, but for the first time God had sent an abundance of girls and there were no available spots in any other cabin.  So she stayed.  And before long she was loving camp...so much she didn't want her new friends to leave on Friday and she didn't want to come back to the States the following Monday.

Our being in separate cabins was just another opportunity for me (and for Joy) to continue to learn to Trust God!  This year we experienced something new - huge thunderstorms in Trinidad.  We were used to tons and tons of rain from 2010, but I don't recall any thunder.  This year we had it two nights...just about all night long, and loud enough to shake the cabins.

At home, Joy comes running to our bed when the thunder wakes her.  But in Trinidad, we were 4 cabins apart.  I was awake much of the night praying for Joy during the storms.  The first night, she slept through all of it :)  The second night of thunder she was awake and was wishing she could be with me, yet she seemed to still be in very good spirits the following day.  God was faithful to ease our fears...literally in the midst of the storms!!


It's appropriate that the Monday theme was "No matter how you feel...Trust God!"   Here, the kids are waiting for the Fizzy Flyer to "pop" and shoot up into the air.  It was used to remind them that even when they feel like they might explode, they can still "Trust God!"

Volleyball quickly turned into mud volleyball...which ended in some slip 'n slide action through the mud bog!

Roger with some of the campers as they wait for food!!