Bridgetown – p3

After Night Strike we picked up donuts for the next morning and headed to a different church to sleep. Minus the fact that we couldn’t get into the building.
Not. A. Single. Complaint. From. Anyone.
They just flopped their stuff down in front of one of the doors and started playing “Big Bootie” (kind of like “Who Stole The Cookie From the Cookie Jar?”) and “Umbrella” (which happens to be one of those games where the entire point is to drive the people who have never played before nuts trying to figure out the rules). By the time they finished “Umbrella,” the door situation was sorted out and they were ready to sleep.
Well, the girls talked for another hour or so, but they were in the general vicinities of their sleeping bags, so we’ll count it as sleep.
7:30am came a little too quickly, but they were spurred on by the thought of donuts. The ants, though, were also donut fans.
Twenty minutes later, the donuts were no longer moving – for the most part – and they ate them anyways, albeit, slightly more carefully than they might have otherwise. Eating ant infested food is a valuable life skill, right?
    
We left the church within minutes of donut consumption and a very short debrief (where one of the guys busted out an awesome analogy about a glass bottle) and drove as far as the Falls before we got out to hike.
Actually, the first leg was more of a run-up-until-no-one-can-breathe-anymore and the second leg was a hybrid between actually “hiking” and clambering-up-places-that-are-not-trail-but-look-cool.
Injuries = 0.
Mud on hands, shoes, and pants = 8.
These things happen when you let Jessica hike with seven teenagers. (They did wash their hands in the stream before we came back down, but I can’t say as much for their shoes or muddy knees.) Sometimes, you just have to get up close and personal with nature.
Lack of sleeping plus rapid hiking is apparently exhausting, though, because most of the van fell asleep on the ride home, one of the boys for long enough to earn himself a SpongeBob tattoo. He woke up during the application process (something about having a damp sweatshirt sleeve pressed against the back of your hand…) but was a really good sport about it and let them finish putting it on anyways.
  The team dispersed fairly quickly after we jumped one dead minivan, and I got to ride home in weather that was huge-blue-sky sunny, not too windy, and far warmer than Portland, full to overflowing from a very GOOD day with some pretty incredible kids and a seriously awesome God.
Bonus: I get to go to Haiti with some of these same kids at the end of July. (And… I think that some of them should come on the Focus Month too…)