Camp and Youth Ministry

Hello everyone, to start this week's blog we have either a bit of good news or a bit of bad news (depending on who you're talking to). The rain has finally arrived at Camp Qwanoes, and it shows no signs of letting up for the next couple weeks. We have been so blessed to have had nothing but sun since the students got here, and we were able to keep it until after Thanksgiving. But the rain has finally arrived, and so the students are finally getting a taste of what a BC Fall/Winter is really like.

We do have a bit of exciting news to report from last week. As we were sailing on the ship, we had a boat pull up next to us and start asking questions. It turns out they were reporters from the Times Colonist, the biggest major newspaper on Vancouver Island, and they were doing a report on boats on the water. We talked to them a bit about the program and they took more pictures. Today, as we were headed to church we were treated to an unexpected surprise! We made the front cover of their Sunday edition!

While none of us got specific name mentions in the article (except for our Captain), and they didn't exactly mention the name of our program (even though I spelled it out for them), we did get nicely mentioned in the article as "college students from both Canada and the U.S." Some of us even got mentions for our pirate costumes! It was nice to see us on the cover today, and if you look closely you can see some of our jackets on the deck.

We were all really excited this past week to have our Camp and Youth ministry class on. We were lucky to have Sid Koop join us from Lethbridge, and Scott Bayley, the director of Camp Qwanoes, joined in on the teaching. We were also able to see a number of Qwanoes Interns take the course as well, so it was one of the bigger classes we will have all year!

We were so excited to have this course offered. I know the students all have really enjoyed it. The feedback has been incredibly positive and it has been mentioned how incredibly practical this course seemed for much of what is going on this year. I know the students are excited to see what they have learned translate into the ministries they are helping. It's going to be amazing to see the students practice what they have learned! The course may have ended for the week, but it will be continued later on this year, so it's not done yet!

We were also really lucky to have the Women's retreat here this weekend! Some of the students were able to serve as we had 70+ women join us from around B.C. With this weekend, the Qwanoes retreat schedule starts! In the upcoming weeks we will have numerous ages of kids and a men's retreat happening around here. The students will get to try out various areas of camp ministry, practicing what they have learned in the class. There are so many areas to serve here, from counseling to dishpit, to kitchen to maintenance, it will be exciting to see the students plug in to "camp life" here at Camp Qwanoes!

Finally for this week, with the busy schedule and non-stop pace It's been fun to see how some of the students have been relaxing around camp. Continuously looking for new ways to have fun, we've seen this manifest itself in various ways. There seems to have been one thing though that has really captured some of the students interests. We now see Slack-lining at almost every opportunity for some free time. It's been a lot of fun to see the students get braver as they cross the rope, and it now sits much higher than it did before! 

I'm off for now, the next blog post will chronicle our surf trip that starts tomorrow! Thanks everyone for reading! Please pray for our safety this next week, we are really excited to head out but could really use some prayer! This isn't Hawaii, so we are in for some cold-water surfing!

Until next time!

Derek