The Break of Spring

The Friday before last we cleaned the camp and got ready for the crazy children who were coming for the weekend. They were Intermediate age, so grade 5-7, and slightly terrifying. I only ever cabin lead teen camps but I love children, so it's not like this should be new to me, it's just that there were so many of them, and they were everywhere. The funny thing is boys and girls at this age sound and act exactly the same - insane. They stayed up until four in the morning and then told us their crazy sugar and Cheesie induced dreams which sounded like nightmares but apparently when you are high on sugar horrible things can happen in your dreams and you will always find them funny, example your dog gets eaten by a whale. Ha ha! My dog died! I picked up an entire bag of candy wrappers and Jones soda bottles from my girls' rooms when they left. It suddenly made so much sense why they had been bouncing off the walls, literally. Despite my fear of them (and you could tell I was nervous because I was trying way too hard to be funny) they were adorable. My favorite part about that weekend was the fact that Steph and Brad were the head cooks. I don't really know how this decision came about. I think maybe Andy drew names from a hat. I really cannot think of any other reason. There were two girls in my "cabin" (we all stayed in the lodges) who weren't Christians and were terribly afraid of offending anyone for their pagan ways. They knocked on my door near the beginning of the weekend with concerned faces and said, "We don't have Bibles." I assured them it was okay. But they weren't done. "It's not that we don't believe in God, we do, we're just not Christians and don't want to offend anyone. And we don't know how to pray, are they going to ask us to pray? I just know you say 'Amen' at the end," and, "What time do we go to bed? The schedule said eleven but I thought that because it was a Christian camp we would have to go to bed at nine." I wish. So cute though.

What an exhausting weekend right? Time for a break! WRONG! YOU MUST WORK UNTIL YOU DIE! That is actually the Auxano slogan. Andy spoke at the Spring Break camp and ended up comparing camp to a prison, which the kids found hilarious. I, on the other hand, know it to be true and wept inside. The weekend came to an end and the kids left and we then had a few hours to clean the entire camp before the Youth Work Week campers came up that night. We then spent the next three days working our butts off doing projects around camp along with the campers. The Auxano students were pretty upset that the RA's got a day off and they didn't. I almost didn't take my day off on Tuesday to show my solidarity with the students, until I got some sense knocked back into me (again, literally, I'm turning over a new leaf and trying to be a very literal person) and I realized being so exhausted I hurt myself wasn't doing anyone any good. We were picking up all the branches Paul was trimming off the trees and taking them to the giant bonfire we had built to burn them. I had been fighting negative thoughts all day, one second completely miserable and hating myself and then quickly reminding myself how blessed I am in a giant bipolar cycle that would seriously make anyone question their sanity. Not me, though, obviously. Then, because I was so tired, I made the poor decision to walk underneath the lift Paul was using to cut branches. I saw the branch hanging on the lift and I thought, "Maybe I shouldn't walk under the lift in case it falls off." Then I thought, "Nah." Well it wouldn't have gone anywhere, except that Paul who has been secretly trying to murder me for decades pushed it off just as I walked under it. Hmmm. He says he didn't see me. Do I believe him? No. He's just lucky I don't sue camp. It would be really awkward though, to sue camp and then not leave because I love it too much.

We had to get up at 6:30 am on Thursday morning to head to Victoria and serve more time in an out-of-prison field trip. Jim took us to Woodwynn Farms which is a farm for homeless people, as in homeless people go to live there and farm, not that they farm homeless people, which would actually be the opposite of the reason for their existence, and we worked our butts off again turning soil and making vegetable rows. I had a bit of an emotional breakdown on the ride going up there because I was so tired. During the morning meeting we sat in on with the staff and volunteers I tried really hard and failed to act like I was happy to be there. The guy next to me kept talking about positive energy and smiling at me. Maybe he could see the negative energy poring out of my eyes. Then he did a thankfulness dance and made us all do it. They kept going around the circle saying things like, "What are you most thankful for this morning?" and "Let's describe our word for the day: Celebration." I wanted to die. Then they asked us, "In two words describe how you're feeling." One would say, "Happy and content," another would say, "Peaceful and curious." I wanted to say, "SHUT UP, EVERYONE, FOR GOODNESS SAKE, JUST... STOP TALKING." Buuuuttttt I didn't. Instead I just kept praying over and over that God would take my mood and turn it completely around. Eventually he did, but not before I nearly cried in the meeting like five times. It's not very often that happy people make me feel worse. I'm usually the one making people feel worse. I mean happy! Making people feel happy... Fortunately I wore my overalls with a plaid shirt and gum boots to Woodwynn Farms so I at least looked adorable, angry but adorable, like a little angry farm elf. I also found out pigs are disgusting creatures that actually probably should be eaten, just to put them out of their misery. I'm a vegetarian and animal activist. They are huge and ugly and could easily kill you just by sitting on you. The pigs there were 600 pounds. I was expecting to see Babe. But the other pigs ate him.

I wrote an email to the Mayor of Saanich afterwards that ended with, "I think Woodwynn Farms is doing something that could drastically change the face of Victoria for the better, even you don't care about helping people. My guess is you do. You're the freaking mayor for a reason." Only in the original I didn't say freaking. You know, cause he might not appreciate how wonderful that word is as a substitute for the f word. The next day we toured Level Ground Trading where they make their amazing coffee. The owner Stacie taught us so much I could never begin to explain it all. Plus I'm sick of hearing my own voice. Check out their website! Level Ground Coffee. They are so amazing and stand for everything that I believe in that just after one tour my new dream is to eventually work there, and I don't even like coffee. It is like a mean joke drink - it smells wonderful and then you taste it and it sucks.

Adventure in Homelessness

Last week was quite the adventure. Auxano took it to the street! Word up! Not quite so gangster as that unfortunately but we did go to Victoria for a week of outreach. We lived at the Mustard Seed which is a church and food bank and multi-function community center in one and we did have a so-called "homeless" twenty-four hours on Thursday. The girls slept in the family centre for the week and the boys in the board room. At first I pitied the boys because all they had was a fax machine whereas we had a puppet show, but it turns out there is no time for puppet showing when you are working your a-double-snakes off volunteering (an expression we found hilarious that week). Surprisingly there was time to read most of The Christmas Pony out loud in different voices until it got so wearisome we couldn't continue. The week fit well with my radical experiment for the year: to volunteer in the community, so as you can imagine I was incredibly happy and felt like I was right where I was supposed to be. Steph was just talking about that feeling on Sunday when we led the church service at Saanichton Bible Fellowship and talked about our experience. I agree. It is a pretty great feeling. You should try it sometime but I warn you it probably means doing something outside of your comfort zone to help someone else. We helped out in the back of the food bank organizing all the donated food. I couldn't believe how much food the Mustard Seed gets every day. Most of the Mustard Seed's clients are low-income families, not homeless people, which just goes to show you how many there are. I found out there are around 1500 homeless people in Victoria, but there are thousands more who are living under the poverty line, especially because the cost of living in Victoria is so high. Apparently the issue in Victoria for the homeless is not food but housing.

We also volunteered at Our Place. They offer free meals to 1200 people Monday to Friday (they don't have enough funding to be open on the weekends) and they have 45 rooms for transitional housing that help the homeless get off the streets and give them a chance at, well, life. We helped out in the kitchen making meals, at the clothing exchange and cleaning the showers, which I especially loved. Don't get me wrong, I don't enjoy cleaning showers but I do enjoy giving  people access to something so simple being clean. We all just want to feel clean. For many of the people living on the street it is not a choice, though for a small few it is. We like to think that so we don't have to feel bad for them. The saddest part is that for so many of them who didn't have a choice, in the end they had no choice but to take substances to keep them warm and make them feel something better than what they were feeling. So we think it was their fault that they got addicted to drugs or alcohol and now have to pay the consequences, but for most of them it's just not true. For a few nights we got to volunteer at Sanctuary Youth which is run out of Church of Our Lord and offers a place for youth under 19 to hang out, to feel accepted regardless of who they are or what they have done. The first night we walked past a few young people begging on the street and invited them to Sanctuary Youth for pizza. We walked past this guy wearing a joker's hat and a mask playing his digeridoo, and who turns up at Sanctuary Youth but Mr. Digeridoo himself? We found out he's a pretty cool guy, a complete hippy, and when we saw him the next night happily playing his digeridoo we said, "Come on out to Sanctuary! There's cookies!" It was interesting to go there and hang out with kids who were obviously stoned. How could we judge them when we had no idea where they were coming from? Or better yet, we knew exactly where they were coming from and it made perfect sense that they would rather go through life high than live without the security of a home, the satisfaction of a job, the love of a family and the support of a community. It was here that I felt most aware of how close I had come to being exactly where they were. Growing up my family was the grateful but humiliated recipients of many a food hamper from the Mustard Seed and we lived in low-income housing for most of my life. There was nothing separating me from these kids but the grace of God. Nothing.

Hope Farm is a rehabilitation centre run by
the Mustard Seed in Duncan.

Thursday afternoon we started our twenty-four hours of being homeless. Even though we weren't able to sleep on the streets like we were hoping to do we still hadn't showered in four days and all we had was a handful of change and no place to go - just a little taste of what it would be like. After sleeping in the same clothes on the hard ground we stood in line for mediocre but much appreciated free breakfast Friday morning at Our Place. We were able to talk to quite a few homeless people, hearing their stories and telling a little bit about what we were doing. Brad and I talked to a guy named Jo we had met at Sanctuary Youth. He was high. He was also hilarious and we all laughed a lot. When we asked where he got the crazy fur coat he was wearing he said he killed a Yeti in the Himalayas with his guitar and I for one believe him. It was clear he enjoyed just having someone to talk to, that feeling of loneliness set aside for a short moment. Friday night we helped with something called Drive-by Cafe through the Mustard Seed. If they have enough volunteers for Street Cafe they take a table downtown and give out free food to whoever comes by. We each got a stick of chalk and went down a few different streets writing encouraging words on the sidewalk. I had a lot of fun writing out the lyrics to the song "Dark Horses" by Switchfoot. And yes. It took me a while. I probably looked like a crazy person squatting on the sidewalk with my sidewalk chalk but a little crazy is good for everyone. The song is about the street kids in San Diego and had become a really special song to all of us. It was pretty breathtaking to praise God on the streets of my hometown with such an awesome group of people after volunteering all week and having our eyes opened. I highly recommend it. But FYI you look really weird. 

We all felt very grateful after that week. And humbled. Most of us plan on volunteering at one of those places over the Christmas break and hopefully it will become a life-long passion helping people who need it most. We might not be able to do anything about the substance abuse or the housing problems but we can certainly make their lives a little better, give them a little bit of love and share a little bit of humanity. These people are not just children of God, they are also just someone's children. Wouldn't you want that for your own?