First day of camp!

Today was busy busy busy! Our first day of camp went well, the first day is always such a learning experience. We spent the day getting to know the kids, the day started out with and evaluation to gauge how advanced the kids are in English to decide the class they should be placed in. After we had a music session and devotion led by the wonderful Mr.Coe. For those who were a part of VBS at St.Lukes, we have been using the song Ancient Words, the Latvians sing it so beautifully. Then we broke out into classes, today's English lesson was about family, and the Bible lesson was about the birth of Jesus. After the class session we had a delicious lunch of vegetable salad, sausage and noodles. We had this very interesting desert that the children had a fun time explaining to us, it was called rice cream (not ice cream) and it was rice in a sort of loose whip cream on top of cherry nectar. It's a rather popular desert here in Latvia, at first sight it looked a little odd, but tasted good nonetheless. After lunch was the Bible lesson and then the craft/activities rotation. The craft for today was to make Christmas tree ornaments to accompany the Bible lesson for Jesus's birth. The older kids activities, thirteen and up, was a game of kickball. We had a blast playing and talking with the older kids. For the record Brian's team beat my team 6-2 (Brian had two home runs). Then the little kids were pretty tired, so we let them sit in the shade and draw with chalk or throw a ball back and forth, pretty low key for them. Next comes snack time where we ate jam and bread, now while that may sound boring, it was the absolute best jam in the entire world. After snack was the drama about the Christmas story and the closing event. As the day was winding down we ate dinner, soup and bread, then we had our meeting to smooth out the kinks in our plans for the next day. A few of us walked down to the store and bought some ice cream, soda, and presents for our families. Since we've been relaxing and preparing for our day at camp tomorrow! One of the ladies in our group from Oklahoma did our nightly devotions and talked about all of the different gifts God has given us. This was shining out today as every person found their own niche and helped everyone to have a fun Christ filled day. Keep us in your prayers!