Come and Go.

As you may have already discovered, I couldn't get onto the net at the camp in the Okanagen. So I'll just go through it really quickly.

The drive wasn't too bad, although we did stop in the quintessential hick town, Merritt British Columbia. There was literally a tumbleweed rolling across the parking lot of the Subway. It was the size of a car tire or something, quite ridiculous.

When we got there, we played some frisbee/football/soccer for a few hours, ate supper and had a lesson/lecture. We met up with two other DTS groups, one from the Okanagen base we were staying at, and another from Medicine Hat. So the first night was relatively mundane, since most people were too tired to be social.

So the next day, we met everyone while they were awake enough. A vast majority of them are from Korea (the South, not communist side), with a few other people scattered about the earth (Samoa, Germans, Alaskan, etc.).

So every day we have a talk in the morning, they were all done by a guy named Ruland, the leader of all of YWAM Indonesia. It's quite neat, because he never took any English lessons in his life, he just learned from hearing it being used. Oh yeah, since about half the people were in the middle of an ESL (English as a Second Language) course, they had a translator the whole week. Anyways, the talks were always based on missions, being a conference about missions and all.

Then in the afternoon, there were workshops on various themes, from fundraising for missions (which I ironically didn't go to) to creative methods of outreach to unreached people (which I did). The other one I went to was all about the crazy happenings in Burma. Essentially it's run by one people group and they want to keep the whole country by themselves. To their dismay, there's quite a few other people groups sharing the country. So the Burmese people send out their army to drive everyone else out of the country, so anyone who isn't Burmese is always on the run.

The creative method of outreach was all about creative ministries, a division of YWAM that takes arts ranging from traditional work from wherever they are (Tibetan art, Chinese art, etc.) to making outreach movies in languages of unreached groups, using actors from the area. It was pretty interesting.

We also played a klot of ping pong. The problem is that pretty much everyone playing was South Korean, which in sequence means that they are amazing. So I did manage to keep up anyways, so that was cool.

There were also a few intercession times in the week, which involved some original form of showing it (a balloon mural, post-it notes all over the walls), which we had every day. We also had one ice time this week, which was fun, but ended on a sour note. I played fine, but right at the end, a stray stick met the face of my roommate, which ended with one less half-tooth. So at the end of the week, pretty much everyone bought a mouth guard.

It was also quite scenic, very much like my house, just more mountainous. Anyways, at the end of the week we had kind of a big send-off, where everyone went on the docks, read scripture over the waters and prayed and such. We then had lunch and left, even though the muffler fell off of out van on the way home for reasons unknown.

Anyway, I hope to buy tickets to the soccer game here, but we might have class that night, which would suck grandly.

That was my week, essentially.
Arrivederci.