Date: 7-14 July 2007
Welcome to junior camp 2007. We had a great week this year, with trips, games, bible lessons, missionary stories, sports, singing, competitions, treasure hunt, handcraft, charades, meals, videos, tuck shop, quiet times, camp fire, shopping and quizzes. In between all this we made friends and learned a lot.
We had two foreign guests with us: Catherine and Jonathan are both from the States and it was good to have them with us. Hopefully they understood most of what we were saying.
This year our bible lessons were about Joseph, so our theme was Egypt. The meeting room and dining room were decorated in keeping with the theme, and we made Egyptian headdresses, sand sculptures and hieroglyphic signs. In missions we learned about Amy Carmichael, who went to India and cared for many children over there. In the evening meetings we watched a video about the Sugar Creek Gang, with lessons to be learned each evening.
On Sunday afternoon we took a short trip down the road to Castle Semple in Lochwinnoch, where we went for a walk along the loch side, looking out for anything colourful or Egypt-related to take back with us. We had a good walk, the rain held off, and we'd have enjoyed feeding the ducks if someone hadn't forgotten to bring the bread :-)
After the walk we returned to our dorms to plot, prepare and plan for charades. The idea is that each dorm acts out a bible story, without words (though the girl dorms invariably have a piece of paper with some words on it). Each performance is marked for acting, costumes, recognisability and afithfulness to the story. This year boys dorm 1 won with their epic story of Samson and Delilah, featuring great displays of strength and extreme treachery.
On Monday we had a full day trip, out to Houston to go horse riding. Firstly we were divided inti 4 groups, and each group had their time in the parade ground learning how to sit on, steer and giddyup their horses.
While each group had their turn on the horses, the others had a chance to look around the stables, meet the horses, and do a bit of grooming.
But the highlight, of course, was getting a shot on a horse, taking it around the ring and waving to the crowd, shouting "Yeehah" as if you were out in the wild west.
The next day was one of our short trips. We had the morning at camp, with Bible, Handcraft, Games and Missions and then in the afternoon we went for a swim at the Greenock Waterfront pool. After dinner there was more time for games before the evening meeting. It was beginning to dawn on some of us that we'd played Capture the Flag more than once this week.
Wednesday is traditionally sports day at camp. This year we had it a little differently though. We had an Egyptian Fayre to go along with our theme for the week.
Each person was given a number of "sheckles" to use at the various stalls. There was plenty on offer, with prizes for skill. The clever ones spotted that some of the stalls offered a bigger payback than others, especially the Beat the Goalie competition before we brought in some pofessional help, but there was always the draw of Dunk the Leader to use up those sheckles.
At the end of it all we had a traditional Egyptian water fight.
On Thursday we made our way down the coast to Largs, and Kelburn Country Park.
There's plenty to do at the park, and we discovered a new attraction, the indoor playbarn with its climbing wall and two slides. Hands up if you were too scared to go on the steep slide.
Friday afternoon is shopping in Paisley time, or trying to keep my kids out of McDonalds time as it's known to the leaders. The pound shops are always a good place to go, and source of most of the midnight feast bounty.
We had some party games on the Friday evening, followed by our last evening meeting. It was time to count up the points from all the activities over the week, and the yellow team just came out on top in the end.
For the first time in a long while it was too wet to gather around the camp fire, despite Andy having stoked it up for hours, so we had hot dogs and crisps indoors, followed by a time around the cross to tell what God had been teaching us over the week. After that it was time for bed, with maybe just a little midnight feast.
On Saturday morning there was nothing left to do after breakfast but pack up and make our ways home. Hope to see everyone again at camp reunion.
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This page by David Meiklejohn.