Summer Recap

Once again, I have failed to blog in a timely manner. On the one hand, I have been extremely busy. But on the other hand, I seem to have spent plenty of time doing nothing. Oh well; musing about my time management skills is not the focus of this entry.
As I mentioned in my last entry, I went on a mission trip with the youth of Hiss United Methodist Church to West Virginia, where we participated in CAMP JOY. We camped at Baltimore-Washington Conference's Camp Harmison, a "rustic" camping facility in Berkeley Springs, WV. When I arrived on Sunday afternoon (after driving for roughly five and half hours from New Jersey) I found twenty youth and adults pitching tents in a meadow at the bottom of a steep, gravel paved road. The meadow brimmed with excitement, as boys tossed footballs, girls hugged and squealed, and family members said good-bye for the week. Two of the youth are boyscouts, and they helped to set up the "girl's tent".



They boys called it, "the Monstrosity". We referred to it as "the hotel".
Each morning we awoke at 5am...well, that's when we were supposed to wake up. Some days it was a bit later. Breakfast was prepared for all the work teams by members of local churches and served between 6 and 7am. We then stopped at Sheetz for coffee on our way out to our work sites.
There were enough workers from Hiss to split into three different work crews, and we worked on a total of five different sites. My crew worked on a home in Berkeley Springs, where an elderly gentleman lived with his daughter who was ill. His great-granddaughters visited the whole week, with their beagle Dallas. While we were there, we tore down a ceiling, re-installed insulation in that ceiling and the walls and ceiling of the adjoining room, then put up sheet-rock for the ceilings and paneling for walls. Two of the adult men on our crew, the two Georges, fixed two rotten floors in the house. We fixed the roof, cleaned the gutters, and in our spare time painted the back wall of the house. The granddaughters helped us, although the youngest one got more paint on herself and Dallas than the wall the first day. : )
Each evening we had dinner at a local church, followed by a vespers service at what the camp called "God's Open Window". There were games and campfires, and everyone felt a great sense of fulfillment at the end of each day.
On Saturday, we loaded up the cars and trekked home, exhausted, but eager to return next year.