Matt Short

     So this past week was what we call Church Serving Week (week 8 of BDTS) where the school broke off into their outreach teams to serve in different areas around NZ. My team was assigned to Kiwi Ranch a small Christian camp which is on the north shore of the South Island in the Marlborough Sounds, more specifically in Curious Cove. It was a LONG 5 hour drive especially with only a handful of CD’s to listen to. =) We met our hosts in Picton where they took us by boat to the camp grounds. 

     We three Colorado boys and the Swiss married couple stayed in one house while the other two European girls lived up the hill. The camp was wonderful, littered with roaming random mamals such as bores, sheep, deer, horses, rabbits, possums and goats which commonly lead to enjoyable past times. Many times on Smoko (tea/coffee) breaks from work us boys could be seen from the dining room veranda running through the fields chasing the bores. 

     The work was vigorous, trying, and slightly adventurous at times. The girls, firstly, I must pay respect to who courageously took to cleaning pretty much EVERY cabin in the camp, a task that lasted the entire week. Us boys at least had many short tasks that seemed like play from time to time. Such work ran from damming a river with rock filled freezers, laying concrete, moving and burning old stuff, catching bores, to painting a wall with 6 layers of paint. All in all it was a good week of exhausting work. 

     Throughout the week we tried to practically simulate what outreach life might look like for the team. Thus we had team meetings and bible studies every day and worship/intersession every other day. This will become a very crucial part of our outreach experience and we must get this down well to work well in unity. I was very impressed by every ones devotion and participation and blessed by their attentiveness. 

     One of the most important things on my mind for this week was to get the team to just enjoy each others’ company and that DEFINITELY happened. I was blessed to discover the humorous side of every ones personality this week and LOVED it! I got some great pictures and would love to show you them so I’ll make sure to do that soon. IF you have myspace or facebook you can see many of them there. Let me know if you would like to hear anymore stories, because trust me, there are MANY! 

God Bless and Thank you for your prayers 

-Matt Short

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 10:21 pm and is filed under BDTS '07 Staffing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.