First day of camp

     Sometimes I really hate technology. I had a bunch of this typed out and it got lost. I'll do my best to bring it back.
     Sleeping on a bus is never easy. Especially one that has to drive on Ukrainian roads. The seats weren't uncomfortable but the road and little time to stretch made the trip tough. We also couldn't sleep a lot thanks to the rough terrain. For the last three and a half hours, our driver had to often swerve to the other lanes to avoid deep potholes.
     We finally arrived here at around 9:30. But in typical fasion, we had to plan on the fly and often found out where things were happening moments before hand. In short, the mantra of the day was "Semper Gumby." The camp is being held at a "resort" town right on the Black Sea.  If you can find Prymors'ke on Google Maps, follow the main "road" East until you find more buildings. This is the resort. As I'm typing this, there are three disco clubs blasting out techno that I can hear over the sound of the air conditioner. It's a nice little village (better term instead of town) but the night - life is very active even at 23:11.
     After getting situated in our rooms, we all met to divide up into teams. Rich and Joan Savoy are on Red team, Austin Lucas and my mom are on Green team and I am on Yellow team. From there we went to play a few icebreaker games with our teams. Each team, along with the leaders and volunteers, has a translator to help us.
     After the icebreakers, we got to go down to the sea and swim. It tastes just like the Atlantic Ocean but has a lot more seaweed. After the long bus ride and the heat, the students really needed the time to blow off some steam and relax.
     From there it was off to lunch and then some time for table games. We finally got to do the teaching segment around 3PM. My mom and Joan took care of the beginner class. Austin and I taught the intermediate level. And Rich had his hands full with the advanced group. Austin and I were able to split the group into two and better handle the task.
     Since it was only the first day, we didn't have a big lesson planned. We started with some basic introductions and moved on to careers or fields of study and then to hobbies. The idea of those was to get them talking and thinking in English before digging into the more complicated part. Like I've said in the past, they do know some English but they just need practice. And they have been getting lots of it already. We finished off the lesson with some reading to hopefully expand their compression and pronunciation.
     Pastor Max started his lesson series this week with the topic of faith. He's working the theme of "journey" into the serries. He used faith as the springboard for explaining the idea of leaving on a long boat journey.
     From there we moved to group discussion (on the beach). Discussion is a time to get the students thinking about their opinions on Max's lecture along with the points it brought up. 
     We had some free time after discussion but I left early to come back and wait for dinner. As I am writing this, they are finishing up a movie before bed. I stopped watching to get this written.
     The meals weren't too weird today. Breakfast was sweet rice with buttered bread and tea. Lunch was borscht with buckwheat, breaded fish (?) patties, veggies and fruit juice. Dinner wrapped up the day with sausage, pasta, pickles and more tea.
     I won't tempt techno - fate any more. I'll wrap things up here. In short, things are going well for the first day. Keep praying for the students as well as all of us who teach and lead them. It will be a long five days here.

      -Quote of the day-
"What devilry encases my sausage?"
(Austin said this whilst attempting to peel the skin off the sausage at dinner)

P.S. I saw a praying mantis today.