In the Beginning

Week 1 is complete, and we are two days into week 2. I had a great first week, and I think the participants would say the same. Activities ranged from fun activities (Olympics, flag football, and "Capitol Chase," an event in which staff and team leaders scattered ourselves around the capitol area, dressed up or disguised in some way, and the participants tried to find us) to powerful sessions, in which, as one participant put it, "the speaker said we were free to go to lunch, and no one moved."

Seeing the teams start getting to know each other and bond has been especially exciting for me to see after last year when my team leader got there three weeks after training started. I remember that during those three weeks my team mates and me being kind of unsure how to start to bond, knowing that someone else would be coming at some point. So to see teams already past just "getting to know each other" this early is pretty exciting for me to see.

One of my big projects this past week has been helping to set up community outreaches for the teams. I was kind of worried about my ability to adequately assist the teams in finding locations for outreach depending on their interests, but God has blessed me with an amazing contact for outreach locations, a little bit of personal experience and knowledge of outreach locations from my training, and some teams that have had the initiative to take some ideas and run with them themselves. So today, most of the teams started their community outreach assignments. We are still working to finalize and concretize plans (umm, put plans into concrete form), but we are farther along in the process than I thought we might be at this point, so I'm excited.

-Ben Herr

HDC Olympics

It has been a busy past couple of days, marked by the arrival of the fall training YES (and STEP) teams. There are a lot of things that could be mentioned, but I'll focus on one event that started as a passing idea a couple weeks ago.

We as staff were talking about who knows what when the idea of doing an Olympics with HDC related events came up. We did some brainstorming and came up with the following events:

Short Track Van Racing-Before you picture people driving vans in circles, this event is based off of short track speed skating. In this event, contestants raced around our big van, Oscar, five times, advancing through heats and semi finals.

Van Slalom-A timed run through the row of vans in the parking lot out back.

Team Leader Van Parking-Team leaders (being the only ones with driving priviledges) get twenty seconds to back a van into a parking space (a skill that they will have to use many times over the next couple months) and scored by how many inches off of the "perfect park" they are.

Round Robin Ping Pong-The classic ping pong for many people game.

Synchronized Laundry Folding-Different articles of clothing/laundry are given degrees of difficulty, and the performance is judged by synchronization, flair and creativity, and quality of folding. We had some doubts about how this would work, given that the teams only found out about the olympics a day ahead of time, but were very impressed by the effort put into it.

Country Find-Contestants try to be the first to locate a country (or landmark in the later rounds) on a large world map after it is called out.

Sword Drills-Contestants try to be the first to find a passage of scripture after the reference is given.

At the end, medals (circluar pieces of wood cut out with a circle drill and painted gold, silver, or bronze) were given to the top three performers in each event as well as to the teams that cululatively scored the most points (3 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze)

In the end, I'm not sure who had more fun, the participants who competed, or us staff who got to see about two or three weeks of planning play out. For both groups, I'm sure, it was a fun evening with memories created. Following are a few pictures from the festivites. I don't personally have pictures of many events due to making sure everything was working, running some of the events, and judging some.

Above, the HDC Olympic logo projected for the opening ceremonies (in which we spoofed off of the Beijing Olympics with a drum routine, had a parade of nations, and lit the olympic flame below)
contestants round the first corner hard in a short track van racing heat
round robin ping pong
The crowd enjoys watching synchronized laundry folding
Oh, yeah, for those of you interested in how your Mountville Mennonite Church representatives did,

Jamila took the Bronze medal in the Country Find,

and Sarah took the Bronze medal in synchronized laundry folding, along with team mate Melanie.

HDC

I'm not sure how many of you have been to/are familiar with Harrisburg Discipleship Center, so here are some pictures.


Out front
the living room

the dining room (these are the team leaders for this fall)
this is my office, or rather, my corner.
This is "The Carraige House" the dorm house behind the main building
and these two pictures are of my room
So that's a brief and rather incomplete tour through HDC. Hopefully it helps give you a mental picture of the place.

Getting Ready

The clock is counting down to the arrivial of the fall YES teams, which means a lot of preparation by us. We've been moving beds, chairs, and sofas to different dorm rooms, setting them up, realizing we want that dresser in a different room, moving more things around, etc. I've also been doing some painting in the Carriage House (the dorm house behind HDC).

This sunday evening (the 7th), team leaders will arrive (for the first time in quite a while, we have all of them lined up before training starts, praise God) and the participants will arrive the next sunday.

Thursday, I met with one of our main contacts for community outreach and we walked around the neiborhood a little bit and stopped at some places that are possible community outreach locations for the teams this fall. It was good to meet some people, and learn a little more about HDC's surroundings.

There's not a whole lot to talk about when you've been pretty much preparing for people's arrival and working on another special event (more on that in a couple weeks), so I think I'll wrap this up. I appoligize for the lack of pictures so far, I'll try to rememdy that sometime soon.

Ben