Week Seven

Sunday

11-1 Church
-Speaking/promotional work
2-5 Prepare for Groups
5-7 Prepare Dinner/ Mingle with groups
7-8 Leader Orientation
8:30-9:30 Prepare Club/Participate
9:30-10:30 Staff Meeting
10:30-11:30 Hang out with Youth/get them to bed

Monday

7:30-8 Devotional Time w/ Students
9-12:30 Work Projects
12:30-2 Kids Club
2-3:30 Pass out popsicles
4-6 Dinner
6-8:30 Figure out Rainy Day Actitivity (phase 10, uno, extreme spoons, Mafia…)
8:30-9:30- Club Time
10-10:30 Staff Meeting
10:30-11:30- Spend time with students/get them to bed

Tuesday

9:30-11:30- Lead students to museum
12:00-3:30- Help with Kids Club
3:30-5:30 Give out snack/ take students to Wounded Knee/ speak
5:30-6:30 Hang out with Students (playing games, mixers, talking)
8:30-9:15- Lead Club
9:15-9:45- Staff Meeting
9:45-11:30 Hang out with Students/Read Bedtime story ☺

Wednesday

9:00-3:30 Make Lists/Organize Community Cook-Out/Inventory
3:30-5 Organize/Take students to feed Buffalo
5-7:30 Dinner Prep/ Make/ Clean-up
7:30-8:30 Hang out with students/Get ready for club
8:30-9:15 Lead Club
9:15-9:45 Staff Meeting
9:45-11:30 Hang out w/ Students

Thursday
9-3:30 Host Museum Tour/ Kids Club/ phone calls
3:30-6:30 Hang out with students
6:30-7:30 Dinner Prep/ Make/ Clean-up
8:30-9:15 Lead Footwashing Service
9:15-9:45 Staff Meeting
9:45-12:30 Hang out with students

Friday
6-8 Lead Clean-Up crews/Set out Breakfast
8-9 Breakfast/final organizing/Hang with students
9-10 Lead send off prayer and final words/Take Pictures
(NAP!!!! ☺)

Saturday
2-12 Shopping Trip

Total: 66 hours
(Running Total: 420 hours)

Personal Reflection

It was so wonderful to be back doing my job again this week! It was good for us to get away for a week so we could really see how much we enjoy our work! I probably have the best summer job ever. It’s so much hard work at times, but the results are amazingly rewarding. The adults we had this week were great and I enjoyed working with them.
I just love meeting all of these people. It is hard to connect so deeply with people and know that they are leaving at the end of the week, but at the same time, just having met many of them has helped to change and impact my life. Throughout this summer God has allowed me to come in contact with some really incredible people and I am so thankful to have met them.
I have learned to embrace things I disagree with and find out what really does make me angry. I know behind those things lie my passions. I’m passionate about people having a real and vital relationship with Christ. I’m passionate about people learning from other cultures. I’m passionate about people loving the lowly. I’m passionate about people being respectful of others when it comes to going into their neighborhoods and lives. Thank you Lord for giving me passion that doesn’t extinguish.


Spiritual Reflection

This week I really felt I had the opportunity to give more one on one help with some students and even some college students who came as adult leaders (yeah they were younger than me and really shouldn’t have been here…whatever). I say this carefully and not in any manner as to glorify myself, but I don’t realize how far God has brought me until I have to start answering questions about my faith. I really wonder why He has blessed me so much in my walk with Him so keep it strong and give me the passions He has. People ask me how I have fallen in love with Him and sometimes I don’t always have an answer. I feel like every reason I’ve drawn closer to Him has had very little to do with me and SOOO much to do with Him. He put people like Joy Cash and James Matchette in my life to mentor me. He carried my through my deepest struggles. He blessed me with supportive parents. Granted it was up to me to stay open, but I feel like I am such a small percentage of the equation. So how did I get to where I am…I suppose I let Him love me and since then I’ve never stopped being overwhelmed.

Week Six

Sunday

3:00-4:00 Hang out w/ Students
4:00-6:30 Make dinner
9:00-11:00 Hang out w/ Students

Monday

7:00-9:00 Hang out w/ Students
11:00-2:00 Run errands/Clean up site
3:00-5:00 Hike w/ students
9:00-11:00 Hang out w/ Students

Tuesday

7:00-9:00 Hang out w/ Students
9:30-3:00 Move paint/drive it to another site
5:30-8:30 & 9:30-11 Hang out w/ Students

Wednesday

7:00-9:00 Hang out w/ Students
9:00-1:00 Mix Paint
1:30-5 Inventory
5:00-6 Prep Cook-out
6-8:30 & 9:30-11 Hang out w/ Students

Thursday

6:30-7 Breakfast prep/ clean up
7:00-9:00 Hang out w/ Students
12:00-3:00 Inventory work/ fax
4:00-6:00 Dinner prep/help
8:00-10:00 Help staff/ chill w/ students
10:00-11:30 Help lead in random amazing worship session
11:30-12:00 Clean up sewage back up in bathrooms ☺

Friday

6:00-9:00 Help other staff/ Get students out
10:00-12:00 Clean our site’s kitchen
12:00-11:30 Grocery trip/ shop/ put away

Total: 68.5 hours
(Running Total: 422.5 hours)


Personal Reflection
It was a much lighter week this week! Praise Jesus! We didn’t have any participants this week and Youthworks doesn’t really give paid vacations so I went and worked at another site that it about 20 miles down the road. My area director gave each of us some time of rest because of the highly frustrating week before. It was so nice to have the option of napping when we needed to, and trust me, I did. I had so missed the naps my body craved. I know it will help for this next week. Because we weren’t the main staff I had time to just hang out with students and really connect with them. I also had the time to run random errands and get some work done that we normally wouldn’t have time to do. It was a great refreshing week! I also got a lot of reading done. I am really enjoying Brennan Manning. I highly recommend him. It’s exciting that I feel like I’m getting SO much experience this summer and learning so much from the internship side of it as well. I know it’s nice to have it look like I’m doing so much logistically, but I’m always trying to keep in check that I am allowing God to do a lot eternally. If you who read this could also keep our work projects staff, Eric, in your prayers he has been struggling with some sickness and we need him better! Not only so that he doesn’t feel like trash, but also so that some of the stress is off my site director and I to take over his job.


Spiritual Reflection

I have been asking a lot of questions while out here and learning so much. I’m struggling with the idea of justice right now. The fact that I think Mt. Rushmore is one of the most arrogant things our country could do and that the US has pretty much ruined the Lakota and set them in the heart of the cycle of poverty. It’s all so unfair and I get so frustrated. Lord, open doors for me to show your love. Open the hearts that need to be here to serve, even if it is my own.

Week Five

Sunday

11-1 Church
-Speaking/promotional work
2-5 Prepare for Groups
5-7 Prepare Dinner/ Mingle with groups
7-8 Leader Orientation
8:30-9:30 Prepare Club/Participate
9:30-10:30 Staff Meeting
10:30-11:30 Hang out with Youth/get them to bed

Monday

7:30-8 Devotional Time w/ Students
9-12:30 Work Projects
12:30-2 Kids Club
2-3:30 Pass out popsicles
4-6 Prepare for Hike (prepare water coolers, make snack, organize First Aid kits…)
7-9 Lead Hike/ Lead with Club (night service- lead worship, speak, coordinate)
10-10:30 Staff Meeting
10:30-11:30- Spend time with students/get them to bed

Tuesday

9:30-11:30- Lead students to museum
12:00-3:30- Help with Kids Club
3:30-5:30 Give out snack/ take students to Wounded Knee/ speak
5:30-6:30 Hang out with Students (playing games, mixers, talking)
8:30-9:15- Lead Club
9:15-9:45- Staff Meeting
9:45-11:30 Hang out with Students/Read Bedtime story ☺

Wednesday

9:00-3:30 Make Lists/Organize Community Cook-Out
3:30-5 Organize/Take students to feed Buffalo
5-7:30 Dinner Prep/ Make/ Clean-up
7:30-8:30 Hang out with students/Get ready for club
8:30-9:15 Lead Club
9:15-9:45 Staff Meeting
9:45-11:30 Hang out w/ Students

Thursday
9-3:30 Host Museum Tour/ Kids Club/ phone calls
3:30-6:30 Hang out with students
6:30-7:30 Dinner Prep/ Make/ Clean-up
8:30-9:15 Lead Footwashing Service
9:15-9:45 Staff Meeting
9:45-12:30 Hang out with students

Friday
6-8 Lead Clean-Up crews/Set out Breakfast
8-9 Breakfast/final organizing/Hang with students
9-10 Lead send off prayer and final words/Take Pictures
(NAP!!!! ☺)
12-11:30 FREE NIGHT!!!!! (Hang out with other staffs, go to Mt. Rushmore and see some IWU peeps…Joel LeMaire & Sara Dekker!)

Saturday
11-5 Shopping Trip
6-10 Cookout with community members and Mission Works Staff

Total: 72 hours
(Running Total: 354 hours)

Personal Reflection

This was such a challenging week. Last week our evaluations were basically out of this world amazing and this week I just felt I was doing awful on everything all week and our evaluations pretty much confirmed it. I don’t understand what went wrong this week, but I know it did. We had three groups that were unbelievably disrespectful and broke nearly every rule and even came up with issues we have yet to deal with. I don’t mean that it happened a couple times, but it was more that every time that one of our staff walked out of a room we would see the students AND adult leaders slapping us in the face with their actions. Setting off fireworks in sleeping rooms, ALs yelling in our face, students sleeping/watching movies at worksites, ALs going out drinking, blatantly going against what we said…just a few of the things we experienced this week. I could tell story after story but the punch line is FRUSTRATION.
And so the whole week our staff was just overwhelmed with the way everything was going. Even one of our alumni staffs said that it was the worst week of Youthworks he’s ever experienced. But then came our final night (it’s always those Thursday’s that get me) and we had a footwashing service. I do a form of creative worship giving them different stations to go to. One they play with clay, another is drawings, then a cross at the back for writing prayers, rocks to represent their burdens that they drop in to a bucket of water and finally a place at the back where a male staff of ours and I kneel and pray for their requests with them. Request after request just broke my heart. It was like no other week. One girl who had just miscarried a child two weeks before coming on the trip, one AL who had a wife and mother both losing their clarity of mind to Alzheimer’s, one girl dealing with a father who is slipping away due to MS, another girl who just had her legs amputated, people loosing jobs, one man who lost his father while on the trip…so many deep requests.
Then it was like I hit a brick wall. “Cami, don’t you see now why they acted the way they did?? They were crying out for MY love. They don’t know My comfort, My care, My compassion. You are My vessel.” So again, I’ve forgotten that my job description will forever boil down to this: Love others. The details of that may change but the basic truth never does. How is it that I keep forgetting? I’m still fallible and I still need Him. I’m grateful that He continues to love me enough to remind me.

Spiritual Reflection

I suppose the last two paragraphs sort of overlap between the two headings, personal/spiritual. I just realize that I have so much to learn. I’m not necessarily in a state of feeling that I’ve failed God, but rather that I am still continuing to learn. I continually need to be humbled. Right now I am reading Brennan Manning’s Importance of Being Foolish: How to Think Like Jesus right now and I am learning a lot. One passage of it speaks about how we as a Church have begun taking the little things we do and pretending that they really live up to all God has called us to. I know that I often want to just feel good about what little steps I’m making for Him, but His calling over my life is HUGE and I can always be taking bigger and bigger steps for Him. I don’t ever want to get to a point where living a Christian life has to be boring and that I’ve “figured Him out” enough to not just stand in awe of Him. I never want to give into the lie that growing in age means that should happen.



Lord, keep this love alive. Amen.






P.S.-Forgive the 700 word posts...It's kind of my journaling, I don't get much time to write or talk to people. :)