6.14.06

6/13/06

Today was another full day at sampler. As usual we started off the day’s activities with VBS at First English. One of the old mothers of the church made it her mission to make sure that there were more kids there today than had showed up yesterday. Well, she was successful. We had a whole bunch of rather rowdy and difficult to handle kids today. I hope that we do not get any more tomorrow. I hate saying that because I really believe that this is an important ministry that we are doing, but I am not sure how well I will deal with having any more kids than we had today.

Another one of my ongoing challenges is figuring out how to deal with one of the samplarians. I can see a great deal of myself in him at his age. I recall the words that a teacher shared with me when I was in high school which changed my way of interacting with other people and I think that I might want to do the same thing for him. I don’t know what I would say or when I would say it, but I have another 2 ½ weeks to figure it out so I’m not in a huge hurry. In fact, the situation might just present itself. Haha, wouldn’t that be nice.

One of the things that we got to do with the sampler kids today was attend workshops on different social justice issues going on in the world and find out what faith communities are doing about those issues. One particularly powerful presentation was on the genocide in Darfur. Apparently some absolutely horrible things have been happening basically right under the world’s nose and nobody is really paying much attention. It seems that we are all too busy with other things clogging up the news cycle. I am frustrated with myself for not being more aware of this, but I am also frustrated with the media for doing such a poor job of covering it. It would seem that with so many 24 hour news stations that they would be looking for stories to cover just for the sake of filling time, yet the genocide in Darfur has gotten basically no press. It is frustrating also that there seems to be so little that I can actually do about it. I guess that one day I will have more power than most because I will have some measure of influence over a group of people who could be mobilized to take action on an issue, but it really just seems like such a small drop in the bucket. I mean, what is one person in the face of a massive government?

I also got to spend some time talking with Robyn tonight. I really wish that I could do more for her or could be there in some more substantial way. She was such a blessing to me during my CPE experience. I’m not sure how I would have made it through without her.

We are finally scheduled for a little down time tomorrow while the sampler kids are off with different mentors. I’m going to use that time to try to get myself hooked up with some wireless internet access. Hopefully that all works out because I’m really having internet withdrawal.