What’s Been Happening at Training Camp?!

I’ve been here at the Adventures in missions base for 15 days now, and let me tell you, so much has happened. Time has flown by, but it also feels like I just got here in some weird way. 

Most days follow the basic structure of waking up around 7AM and spending personal time with God before we have breakfast, spend time worshipping, attend sessions, have lunch, do another session, spend time with the squad to debrief the sessions and talk. Then we have dinner, and sometimes we’d have more squad time or have free time afterward, then we head to sleep in our tents.

That’s a relatively broad description of what life looks like out here though. There’s so much to tell, but only so much can be shared over a blog post. So to keep this interesting, and to give you a feel about what life’s been like (outside of a schedule), I’m going to just go through and share something that’s been memorable from each day I’ve been here so far.  Here goes nothing…

August 31st – I arrived at the base with my team. They had made a welcome sign, and then some of my squad helped me put together my already broken tent in the dark. 

September 1st – At lunch my squad played this game called ‘physician’, where one person had to try and find the pattern of what everyone else was doing by asking them questions. It was fun and I got to know some of my squad better.

September 2nd – For lunch and dinner we ate Indian meals with our hands.

September 3rd – Our Alumni racer friend Amelia brought us ice cream after dinnertime, then I played cards with some of my squadmates.

September 4th – I was on dish duty after dinner with three of my squadmates and we listened to music while working. It was a random moment, but I enjoyed it. We also did squad church today, got some nice team and squad photos together. (pictures below)

September 5th – I woke up for breakfast and they served me a black fermented asian duck egg. I decided to just not eat it. 

September 6th – Adventures put on a market for all the squads to prepare us for the worst markets we may encounter on the field. So we showed up, cars were driving through, people were shoving each other, unzipping bags, people selling food didn’t speak english, our team got ripped off at the currency exchange stand so we ended up with food enough for only like 3 people instead of 8. It was really fun though. Someone drove by at one time, and they looped their finger onto my water bottle and my teammate Madilyn used her super cool ninja moves to grab it back out of her hand and put it back in my bag. Also shoutout to the boys on my squad because they shared their food with us because my team didn’t have enough.

September 7th – We left camp for the first time and went to Walmart to evangelise! Me and two of my teammates got the opportunity to share the gospel and pray with a lovely woman who had never heard the gospel of Jesus before. It was so amazing!

September 8th – Our squad leaders set up foot washing stations to model to us what Jesus did for his disciples. They washed each of our feet, and some of us watched theirs too. We also spent time in worship and did communion. We’re so blessed to have these leaders, (shoutout Milly, Clayton, Gracie, Nick and Luis, we love you guys).

September 9th – Today was our squad wars. All the different squads here at adventures faced each other in games of dodgeball, a relay race and a dance competition. I’m very proud to announce that Squad L came in a whopping 5th place! (Out of 5 groups) But we had a great time, and we preformed a very entertaining parody of ‘In the jungle’ with lyrics related to camp life here. (Pictures below)

 September 10th – We left camp again today to go help out at a women’s home. I worked on pulling weeds and trimming some bushes in their garden.

September 11th – Today was our sabbath. No work allowed. I played lots of card games with my squad (I didn’t win even once).

September 12th – Highlight of today was the session we did. They are always great but I enjoyed this one particularly because we went through the order and history behind each book of the bible. Super cool stuff.

September 13th – Today was our laundry day. It may not have been the highlight of the day but I wanted to give you guys an idea of what laundry looks like here. We use two buckets of water, one with detergent and one for rinsing, and we just wash our clothes. Pretty interesting right? 

September 14th – Today was nice and sunny, so the entire squad went out and played some soccer, volleyball, and spikeball. It was a great time. 

So there’s the rundown. This isn’t an amazing representation of all of what we do here, but it does kind of give you an idea of some of the stuff we’ve been up to here. It may sound like a lot of play and no work, but don’t worry, we’re doing so much in preparation for the mission field over here. We cover so many heavy topics all day, so it’s been easy to appreciate some of these small memorable moments from each day. 

Anyway, that’s all I got for now! Blessings!

– Hannah 🙂