Summer!

Now that it's getting up to around 31 degrees and we are swimming until about 9 at night... I think I can say quite safely that we have entered summer up here in Canada now. This means a few different things... It means that those people i love back home are most likely pretty cold as they read this, that some of you have snow outside, some of you have fires going and some of you are jealous of me. It means that the mosquitos are out in full force here, I think at one point I had a total of about 45 bites on me at once. The guys say that if you dont use bug spray and just tough it out, your body will get used to it and it wont be so freakin annoying... but I havent worked out if they are secretly using spray and its this big joke to watch me trying to become immune to something my body was not designed to get used to... i will tell you if this ever happens. It means that the Outdoor Ed team here for the 2011-2012 season are packing up and leaving, some back home, some to summer camps. I've only been here 3 weeks but I've enjoyed working with them and hanging out in the evenings a whole lot... if next year's team is anything like this, I will have a lot of fun! It means we had to shut down the entire site yesterday to get it ready for the summer...so clean everything, organise everything, return everything to other camp sites, fix everything that was broken... and I used to think Friday afternoon clean ups at Teapot were bad... wow. But most of all it means that in a couple of days I will be moving over to Girls camp for the summer months. For those of you who dont really know what my role there is, I thought I would talk a bit about it. Girls camp is a seperate site from the rest of the camp, on the other side of the lake and during the summer for two months they run camps for girls aged 11-16. There is a massive staff team, everyone from instuctors to cooks to cleaning people to chalet leaders to worship leaders to directors to nurses.... about 70 in all this summer. My job is as a chalet leader for the older girls, so those aged 15/16 ish. I will have a group of about 4 or 5 girls for a week (or sometimes for two weeks) and I live with them in a chalet in the bush... I do fun things with them during the day, I sleep in there with them at night, I do bible studies,I listen to their stories, I have campfires with them, jump into the lake with them... pretty much I just get to love them and be their friend for 6 days. Then we change over on a Sunday, the staff get a day off and we all go to church at the outdoor chapel across the lake... hopefully sleep a few hours, then the next group of girls arrive on Monday morning. So it will be a pretty crazy intense summer with a lot going on, which I am so excited about but Im also aware of people burning out when they live like this for too long. So for those of you who are praying people.... if you could be praying for energy and passion for me, that I would be able to bless and serve the community I am living with, both the girls who come and the women I am working alongside, that would be so much appreciated.
This will most likely be my last post for the summer, as I dont have access to a computer or to the internet except on a few occasions... but i will have so many great things to write about when summer is over! untill then, thank you for your prayers. I've found a home here, but I still miss a lot of you a lot of the time.