Tuesday Update!

Tuesday Feb 13th 14.00

Have just finished our lunch on our first full day and have had our de-brief over coffee.
So what has happened in the past 24 hours to your intrepid (and now, slightly more tired) team?

Monday night was when the conference formally began with people arriving throughout the afternoon. Some of the trips made ours sound like an easy day trip to Weston; one family had experienced cancelled planes were rerouted via Paris, drove to London and then flew from there into Nairobi. These guys are that desperate to be together. Sat down at the evening meal time and found the girl went to Woodies .. We had a short introduction to the whole conference and then took most of the kids out from 7.45 to around 9; this gave most of the adults chance to be in the first meeting and for us to get to know the kids who were allowed to stay up late. We sang our 'theme tune' (I reach up high ...) and played a few games to get to know each other. Dropped into bed fairly early - most of us are waking up at funny times in the night, so pray for good rest when we do drop off.

Today, Tuesday, we started with the kids at around 8.45 and things really kicked off. The kids are really responsive and the theme tune is now getting noisier, the actions more co-ordinated and the dancing bit more progressive (Stewart, eat your heart out). Today we decorated tee-shirts; the kids loved this and some of the designs were very creative. To do this we split into two groups and whilst one lot did the shirts the other groups did some more activites in the main hall with a parachute. After a refreshment break we broke into our age groups; Ben, Ann and Julie were with the 3 to 6 range and Esther, Mike and Sam with the older ones. We spent 45 mins learning about Gideon - God calling him, shrinking his army and overcoming hte Midianites without lifting a finger; we asked the kids about times God had helped them in difficulties and some pretty amazing stories came out - my family was in the middle of an earthquake ( 7.9 on richter) and our house was the only one not affected ... who is teaching who about trusting God??

We then regrouped to make salt-dough sculptures, supposedly relating to the Gideon story, but some apochraphal versions exist, including one with a dragon in. The kids made much better stuff than the team - this afternoon the dough will bake hard in the sun and tomorrow we will be painting it.

In all our excitement, forgot to take any pictures so you will have to imagine us ... tomorrow we'll try to get some pictures of us in action.

Love the Team.