Leech Lake - Day 4

No long introduction today, here's some great stories from some great students!

Today was our third service day. I was working at kids club which is a Christian summer camp. Kids club is my favorite work site because I always learn a lot from them. They are so honest and over share. Today I heard a girl say that her family doesn’t talk about church because that’s where they torture people. And it was surprising to hear other people’s view on Christians because I feel like sometimes we come into mission trips feeling like we are heroes but people in this area have traumatic incidents with Christians. But on a positive note today we walked down to the lake near the church we are staying at and I saw a lily pad for the first time. Then I saw a bunch of snail shells. I picked up a weird looking snail shell and I realized it was actually still living. I kept a couple empty snail shells and named them after the Backyardigans. It was really exciting to look at God’s creation and I really enjoyed looking at the beautiful landscape. It was definitely something you can’t see in Indiana. Then after that we walked to this coffee shop that was also an emergency shelter. The owner showed us around the shop and the upper floor that she renovated into a bunch of bedrooms. It was really nice and they had one of the best vanilla iced coffees I have ever had. Then at the end of the day we went swimming and thankfully no one almost drowned this time. Overall this day was really fun. (Also as I was writing this Liz murdered a spider that was on Callie’s pillow) -Kaycee

Today’s activities for my group was a new experience for the week. We started off by going to a community member’s house (Joy) and picked up trash for the first part of the day. The interesting thing about her house was that she had wild rice processing equipment that they used at one point in the past. Her son was there for a little bit and he stopped our group and explained how everything worked and shared some funny experiences he had when he used to do it. After, we all took a lunch break and when we got back Joy was there and gave us new instructions for what she wanted us to do. The girls in my group took the task of starting to paint her house while me and the other guys had an interesting task. At first we started to clean out junk Joy didn’t want around the processing equipment and then we moved onto destruction… So she had an old dead chicken coop made of wood and a few walls of sheet metal that she wanted gone. The thing about the walls of sheet metal was that they were nailed to wooden stakes with nails and we didn’t have any hammer or other tools to help us take them off. So us boys decided to pick up some metal pipes that were laying around and absolutely go to town on these walls. And let’s just say thank goodness Mr. Henke was watching over us and not Liz or Anna because they would not have approved. We all took turns swinging on the walls and we were just destroying everything. Once we got done with those metals walls at that point we were just doing the destruction for fun and the chicken coop did not stand a chance. We all ended that work day with smile on our faces and an interesting story to be told. Other than the usual stuff we do after leaving work sites like showers and free time, for our evening activity we went to a lake right near us and we all swam and played volleyball. Because we were having so much fun, we decided to do our church group time at some picnic tables right near the water and other than the mosquitoes it was an eventful unplanned night! –Matthew

Today we got to do kid’s club! This is my favorite thing to do on Youthworks trips, since I love kids and creating relationships with them. I played with kids on the playground, read them a story about Jesus, and played basketball and 4 square. During dinner, the Youthworks staff set up a luau with decorations and music, which was really fun. Then we had the gathering and evening activity. The evening activity tonight was swimming at Walker Beach. We all went in the super cold lake and some of us played volleyball as well. We loved it so much that we stayed at the lake for church group time as well. On the way back to the church, the people in the bus sang (actually screamed) Disney channel movie songs at the top of our lungs. It was a great day! -Morgan