Hi everyone, I am finally getting around to posting after too long. This long note I wrote a week ago. Hope you enjoy it. :)

This last week has been a crazy one (I guess 10 days really :) ). As I have said before the leader’s camp was good. It was tough, but I liked it. Then we had a 24 hour time to rest. During that time Mr. Easter and I went around helping get the camp in order for the kids and then we had supper at the pizza place that has the room upstairs and looks from the lower part of the plaza (next to the bank) up onto the church. It was good (as good as I remember :D ) and fun to be back where we had supper last time we were here.

Then Tuesday morning started out slow, but when we found out that the bus had actually left on time (I couldn’t believe it!) we went into panic mode. We started rushing around like chickens with our heads cut off and for me that was super stressing... That set the mood for the rest of the day so I was kinda frazzled the whole time. When the kids got here and we got organized things started working out and it was fun. We did lots of activities and had lots of time in the lesson room. It rained two of the days and that was kinda hard to keep the kids in an amused mood. But things went well. I had a good group and the guy I worked with was really helpful and a solid kids camp leader/counselor. We had fun and I think the kids (at least in my cabin came away a little different than they had arrived). This all seems so long ago as I write it down now because of the camp that just finished... WOW!

Anyway, on Friday we again got 24 hours to rest and relax a little. This time Mr. Easter left and therefore we didn’t get organized to help with the cleaning of the building etc. Therefore, Christina, two of the other leaders, and I went off to town and hung out there for most of the afternoon (at the french pastry shop). Then after supper (Carmesa and Mrs. Easter cooked that night and the next morning) we went back into town and hung out there till I finished with the internet and one of the other leaders finished watching his soccer game. We didn’t go to be too early that night (really bad idea!) and the next morning we got up early. That was a very relaxed morning ad we basically waited for everyone to show up from Bogota/Duitama. When the got here we got organized as counselors (Different leadership that was much more on top of things and more capable of organizing which was very good!). Then we kicked off the real activities with a great set of games that set the mood for the rest of the weekend. That made it a great weekend and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves very much. We did lots of games as we also had 5 very sermons done by Mr. Easer and Orlando Bueno. We used the system of meditation that was taught at the leader’s camp for a workshop after each sermon. The basic idea of the system is that you look at the verse or set of verses and divide it up into sections, main ideas, words, or key words and then you ask what does it say/mean and why does it say that? You as the questions in that order so that you can have a solid idea of what the verse actually says. It worked well and I think that some of the kids caught on really well. It was fun to watch them getting their hands “dirty” in the word even if they didn’t always communicate what they learned well and/or didn’t actually get the point of each verse. I was just happy to see some progress from the first workshop to the last. So generally this weekend was a great success and I liked it a lot.

Thinking again over this last week it has been great to connect with people that I knew before and to get to know people that I have never met before. The leader’s camp was especially neat for me because of all the leaders I had never met and yet they were all so easy to talk to (partly because I am “Jim Fleming’s son” ! and also because they are all there to learn so they just drop right into subjects about the bible or about what you are doing without a single problem.) So I had lots of good, fun, exciting, and encouraging conversations that weekend. It was good to see all the leaders together with the goal of better handling the word of God and also getting together to share with each other. I also got to know a lot of kids this week and that was good too. Two conversations that I have had in the last week really impacted me; the first one I had while talking to the administrator of the camp after a lesson during kids camp. We were talking about struggles we have in the christian life and it was really neat to encourage him to keep up with what he is doing because God IS working in his life. He knows it and I could share with him some of my experience this last year of how God has been working in my life and he seemed to be encouraged knowing that what he is feeling is positive. The second conversation was with one of the counselors at the youth camp. He is a guy that knew the gospel for a long time before he really accepted the Lord as his savior (to the point that he thought he was saved). He has had struggles as a result (in his pre-salvation experiences) and he feels like he waisted those years. Now he is very active, but he wishes things were different before. So, for him it is very encouraging and motivating seeing me working for the Lord because, while he can’t change his past (and actually he accepts that God worked the way he did for a reason), he can encourage and help others who are at my stage of life take advantage of what time they do have and on top of that he can keep going in the things of God himself. So those two conversations were really neat.

Samuel