The Sunnyside Youth Group 2013 Mission Trip to Arizona (SYG2MTA?) was amazing, and like all amazing week-long events, my dimming recollections won't be able to do justice to the trip. How can I recount the feelings and thoughts and emotions that 25 human beings experienced? I cannot. But I'll try to give you some (brief?) summaries of what went down from May 31st - June 8th.
May 31st: We went to Arizona.
June 1st-7th: We stayed in Arizona.
June 8th: We came home from Arizona.
Whew! That was much simpler than I first imagined.
I'll fill in a few particulars, for those of you that haven't honed your "reading between the lines" skills.
By day, we did work projects. By night, we hosted a summer VBS at Aim Right for inner-city kids in the Garfield district of Phoenix, population 1.5 million.
ONE.
POINT.
FIVE.
MILLION.
People.
Half of the entire population of Iowa in a sprawling 518-square-mile city.
We arrived late Friday night. The heat outside the terminal had a real presence to it, like a creepy relative or a giant thermal blanket. By the time we found our sleeping quarters, it was early Saturday morning, and we were ready to conk out.
On Saturday, we went to downtown Phoenix and took a gander at the sweet buildings, palm trees, pieces of art, and awesome-futuristic-electric-train public transit system. We grabbed a filling meal at an authentic Mexican restaurant, and I grabbed a giant horchata beverage. Iowa is a wondrous place, but we are seriously lacking in the rice-and-cinnamon beverages.
After lunch, we went shopping to purchase 25 people's food for a week. Wanda, our brave "Grandma" (Or G-Mom, as she later became known) split the shopping list into portions and divided it amongst us eager shoppers. What ensued was a large-scale scavenger hunt through the bowels of a Super Walmart, ending in eight loaded shopping carts and $1,200-worth of groceries. From Walmart we packed the guys in one van and the girls in another. The girls headed to get raw meat, the guys buzzed over to a Specialty Foods place so I could pick up some gluten-free mixes and soups. The total for all the groceries was somewhere close to $1,400, which sounds outrageous until you see that Fearless Leader Leon had calculated that it would cost roughly $3 per person, per meal, to feed us, and therefore had budgeted $1,500.
We packed all the food into every refrigerated spot we could find. I tossed my spare insulin into one of the fridge's cubby-holes marked "Butter". (Once I break the seal, the insulin I use can be kept at room temperature for its three-week lifespan. All extra cartridges need to be refrigerated.)
We prepared for VBS, gathering supplies and props, decorating classrooms, setting up tables and chairs, and checking the snack provisions. Amy, the secretary at Aim Right, rushed hither and yon to answer questions, help us locate supplies, and give tours.
In the evening, we hiked up North Mountain. The ascent took us three times longer than we expected, but the incredible view from the top was worth every step. From the peak, we looked in every direction, as far as our eyeballs could see, and yet Phoenix stretched out past the limits of our vision. It was deep night and the lights of the city cast a glow through the flat desert. Other mountains and hills within the city limits stood out in dark relief against the sprawling metropolis. We had some prayer and worship time up on the mountain, and it started the week off in a fantastic direction.
From there on, the week ripped along like a chipmunk on LSD.
1. The Grand Canyon.
Read this.
2. The Work Projects.
We spent a great deal of time cleaning the Aim Right church/school/activity building as well as the dorm house across from it. I was placed on Screen/Window Cleaning Duty, which suited me just fine because I particularly enjoy heights, and the screens had to be taken down with a giant ladder. The work took a lot longer than I initially thought, but that was because we had to work on the sides of the building opposite the sun, lest we melt under its ferocious glare. Heidi, Wendell, and I (with brief appearances from my brother Shane) spent a good portion of the week cleaning. The windows and screens had caked with dust and pigeon
Other crews mopped, dusted, and painted. A large portion of the guys re-shingled the roofs (I feel that 'roof' plural should be "rooves". You know, like hoof/hooves?) of three little mini-barn storage sheds. On several days, the roofers got up at 5:30 A.M(!). to avoid turning into lobsters.
3. The Meals.
Shaina (who quickly became "Mom") and Wanda were most often found skipping around in the kitchen, locating pots, pans, and utensils to cook up monstrous feasts for us. We all took Kitchen Duty turns, where we'd assist in the prep, food makery, and post-meal-cleanup. Despite our involvement, the meals turned out excellent. Wanda and Shaina took extra good care of me, which I was very, very grateful for. We tried our best to devour all the groceries, but we didn't quite finish them off. Like good Mennonites, we debated about taking the extra groceries with us back home. Just kidding. We left those with Aim Right, for the staff to make good use of.
4. The VBS.
Everyone chipped in to make a lively Bible school. I was given the task of corralling the Kindergarten-aged kids. There were moments I felt like a cowboy, out in the Wild West, trying to pen in some wild stallions. Harmony and Dylan were my expert co-wranglers, and we had a mother-daughter team that came in and helped Monday-Thursday. The girls were the sweetest little angels you could ever imagine, which was a blessing, because I had to keep my eyes on the boys at all times. Some of the boys were especially ornery, but we had a lot of fun. I finally miss them. ;) We were separate from all the other groups, so instead of dumping them off at the Game station and Story station, we did that ourselves. We joined the 1st-graders for Bible Memory, Snack, and Craft. I'm fairly poor at deciding which games to play with Kindergarteners. I've played hundreds of games as a kid, but all of those activities left my brain and I was stuck trying to remember more than Freeze Tag and Duck-Duck-Goose. By the end of Tuesday, I had exhausted all of the easy-to-remember children's games, and was inventing other games to play. We normally played outside, but Thursday was just too hot. I wanted to go outside anyway to make homemade bubbles, but I hadn't foreseen that Arizona's freakish lack of humidity would evaporate bubbles before I could blow them. So I just decided to have the bubble-blowing indoors. In our classroom.
It started off swell. I had two bowls of warm water with heavy doses of dish soap. The first exercise was to bend a little bubble wand out of pipe cleaners, but they ended up soggy and useless. It did not matter that my genius-brainstorm-pipe cleaner idea worked BEFORE class, all that mattered was that it wasn't working for the kids. So I showed them how I made bubbles by carefully dipping my hands in the mixture and blowing bubbles through my connected fingers. The bubbles were the size of basketballs, and the kids were delighted. Well, they started trying it and succeeded in blowing large quantities of soapy water all over the classroom. While I was blowing bubbles, the boys had completely frothed up their soap-water by jamming their hands in the bowl and churning it up. I glanced away for TWO SECONDS and that's when they dumped their bowl on the table. There were suds everywhere.
Then the girls dumped their equally-sudsy bowl. The kids started squealing and giggling and the whole place smelled fantastic and the bubbly-soapy-liquid mess was somehow staying on the table but I was beginning to envision soapy hand prints on every surface in the room. Harmony was giggling and drawing shapes through the thick suds on the tables, and the kids joined in. It looked like a giant Etch-a-Sketch. Due to the small classroom packed with energetic kids, we left the door open. People wandering by began to poke their heads in to see what the commotion was all about, and why our room smelled like a Fresh Mountain Spring. Nicole, the awesome mother helper, had kept her hands out of the soap this entire time. This was fortuitous, because everyone else had soap suds up to their elbows. Soap was now dripping onto the chairs. The kids were laughing and the boys started to chase each other around the room. "ALL RIGHT" said Nicole in her loud-yet-patient-and-kind voice, "Let's pretend we're doctors preparing for surgery. Put your elbows at your sides, hands in the air. Let's go wash your hands, but don't touch any walls or doors or kids, OK?" The kids, grinning madly but eager to listen, lined up at the door and pranced to the bathrooms. I ran to the basement, scratching my head. How do you clean up a mess? Warm, soapy water. How do you clean up a soapy mess? Rags and water, I supposed. I snatched a stack of dry rags from the kitchen and Dylan and I mopped the piles of suds into a bucket. We washed and dried the table, along with several chairs. When we were finished, the table was reasonably dry and the room smelled like it had never housed a single sweaty Kindergartener ever, which was nice.
Other parts of VBS went great.
The drama team (Christopher, Roshona, Emily, and Wendell) was awesome.
The snack team (Brendon and my brother Shane) was a Godsend. I was grateful each night to have them pile out the goodies while I caught a moment of rest.
The craft team (Eleanor and my sister Sheryl) did a fantastic job churning out cool crafts while patiently explaining the steps to dozens of kids, over and over.
The worship team (Heidi and Grace, with help from Rolanda and Harmony) taught a dozen songs and made up motions to get the kids involved. Boy, did they get involved. One of the songs required a jumping stomp. The kids got into it and one of the stomps sent a vibration all the way through the sanctuary and disconnected the cord to the ceiling projector.
The story team (led by Jeremy) and game team (led by Jared and Rylan) also did fantastic jobs, but I heard about them second-hand, since our group didn't visit them.
5. The Insulin Incident.
The week was moving right along, and I used up a cartridge of insulin. I headed to grab my other one from the refrigerator. I opened the door and found myself looking at a completely different appliance. I searched for the other fridge, but I couldn't find it. The refrigerator I had put my insulin in had been filled with various drinks and snacks, so I thought "surely, whoever moved refrigerators emptied it into one of these fridges." Well, I couldn't find my insulin. Someone mentioned that a fridge had quit and they had moved it outside. I went outside, and found my insulin, tucked in the butter cubby-hole of a non-functioning refrigerator, which had been parboiling away in the sun for the past 12 hours. I quickly recalled that insulin is "never to be frozen, and never to exceed 86 degrees Fahrenheit." It was currently 109 degrees in the sun, the insulin was more than likely sterile by now, and I was 1,511 miles away from my pharmacy. I talked to Fearless Leader Leon about my predicament. He told me that he'd drive me to a hospital if I needed to go. I told him that we'd pray about it, and ask God to allow my insulin to work. So we did, and He did. Praise the Lord, that insulin worked perfectly. It was nothing short of a miracle.
6. The Local Kids.
The boys and girls that came to the camp were crammed with energy and excitement. Sometimes I felt like we were teaching, feeding, and playing with primed grenades. The Aim Right ministry has a lot of similarities to our local Kids Club ministry (more accurately, we resemble them) but they've been around for quite a bit longer than we have. Aim Right does activities with the local kids once a week, while we only meet once a month. The amount of time invested in the children really showed though in that they were very respectful and listened well, once you raised your voice above the general din.
7. My Evil Pinky Toe.
I've shared about my broken toe before, but it was a pretty defining aspect of the trip. I didn't allow it to limit me from hiking up the mountain or around the Grand Canyon, but it would rage fiercely against me. I was often found with my foot stuck in a cooler of ice water. At the beginning of the week (and at regular intervals throughout), I prayed "Lord, please do not let my dumb toe get in the way of serving You." And He honored that request. I was able to run around with the kids, interact with my youth group, and explore Phoenix. My toe DID however exclude me from participating in the boxing mayhem that spawned when some of the guys found some punching bags and boxing gloves. I was asleep when they started boxing each other. A lot of the boys (and some of the girls?!) were very sore for the remainder of the trip, but you'll have to ask them for the details.
OH MAN. I need to go to Prairie Camp in Indiana, so I'll have to finish this at another time. You may now expel a sigh of gratitude, since this post was going to be longer than a beard on Duck Dynasty.
I suppose I have three-and-a-half seconds to explain. I'm gonna be a counselor at Prairie Camp in Indiana for this next week. Please pray that God would have His way. I will see you all later.
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