Second installment on my summer people!
So really the second installment spread over the period of 8 days where I was on Parachute crew. Parachute is a big Christian festival that runs over a weekend, arrive Friday, there all Saturday and Sunday and leave Monday. So I was on village crew from the Sunday beforehand to the Tuesday evening afterwards.
Village crew was by far the coolest crew on the whole set up team. We set up the “village” which is where all the stalls and food things went. People spent lots of their time in the village and it was a pretty cool place to set up. It mainly consisted to setting up many marquees and putting out chairs (only 1300 of them).
I think definitely a big highlight for me was getting to help on the waterslide construction. One of the bottled water companies, pump, sponsored a water slide to be built but not just any water slide… an awesome one. It was 32feet long, I think, down a hill and went into a big splash pool. It was really good fun and the village crew got to test it, so we all tried all the different positions we could think of… most of them hurt quite a lot.
So to the actual event, Parachute festival. Lots of bands were there like third day and other people like that, which was cool but kind of only highlighted to me that the general church youth only know how to “worship” to loud music and un theological words… I made me sad to watch some of the bands and how they communicated with the crowd. Parachute also had some speakers who I can’t give much more praise to because they did not really open the bible at all.
As much as all this stuff seems to be all bad I decided parachute was awesome not for the on stage stuff or even the water slide but for the meeting Christians aspect of it. I got to meet all the people who were on camp the two weeks previous and a chance to meet with new people and talk about anything and everything. It was so awesome to be able to share and listen to others about issues for a young Christian.
So overall parachute for me was about people not the “important people” up front who got the crowd to cheer but the people who are on genuine walks with God and willing to discuss there faith and what they believe.
Sorry it has been such a long time since I last posted but I have been ridiculously busy recently and unfortunately that is affecting my communication with you guys back home.
Bless Ya
Andrew
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Monday, February 05, 2007
summer of sun!
Ok so I have not blogged for like ever but now the time of information is back… sort of.
So right now I am still recovering from my summer of intense work (you will get the pun if you read it out loud) where I was camping in tents (hah get it?), playing sport in ridiculous heat and putting up marquees it ridiculous heat. Much of what I did over the summer was in ridiculous heat, whether it was really blazing hot sun heat or lots of cloud cover humid heat it was generally hot. So now I will tell all of you about what I did over the summer in a tad more detail but first to get something out the way, I have had the worst rugby watching weekend ever!!! Scotland sevens lost to like everyone (there was IRB rugby sevens on in Wellington this weekend) Scotland 15s lost to England and the Waikato Chiefs lost to the Brumbies…. Not fun!
Ok so I will take it from Christmas time. I got back from the south island safely and the next day I had a birthday party to attend and it was so much fun… on a bouncy castle. I probably lost like 10kg just on that day alone because bouncing is such hard work. So I rested for like a day then I was away to the first camp of the summer on the 31st of December! That is New Years Eve! So we had the leaders only day on the 31st and then all the campers arrived on new years day. It was a sports camp and was awesome but absolutely blazing heat the whole week. I don’t think I have ever drunk so much water and put on so much sunscreen… and I didn’t get burnt! The camp was for 15 – 17 year olds so the sport was pretty intense and competitive. Second day in I sprained my finger pretty bad and I could not play guitar! I was gutted. But the rest of the camp there was barely any injuries at all. My team did not win in the end but I think we had the most fun… with out winning. Some of the sports we played were:
Cricket
Football
Ultimate Frisbee (on the biggest field ever)
Volleyball
Indoor football
Netball
Aussie rules football (awesome game)
Touch rugby
Hockey
Softball
Mattress softball (best game ever – instead of bases you have piles of mattresses and you are out if you are in-between bases when the bowler gets the ball but if you are in the air you are fine… i.e. diving for the base)
American netball (rules of netball on an American football field and American football ball)
There is probably more but I can’t remember. So yeah that was a cool camp and I made some pretty cool friends, one of them is training with the tall blacks (the basketball team of NZ).
So then I had a three-day break (not long enough) and it was off to the second camp called Ponui Island Senior (original as). It was on an island on the east coast of Auckland. We took this big barge across and the place was awesome! It was basically a big beach where the main stuff happened. We were in tents but there was a hall and a kitchen and stuff… no real toilets. This camp was for 15-18 year olds and was really cool; it was just a really cool bunch of people. It was kind of hard being a leader when I was so close to the age of the campers but turned out alright, I just talked with a deeper voice (hah, hah someone asked if I was 26). The music was awesome at this camp and really loved the singing and stuff, but for the first few days I could not play guitar because of finger. We did loads of cool things and went on ‘tramps’ (walks) then camped out in random places, which was cool. The forecast all week was rain and not just hazy stuff like, rain of the drowning type but God must have been like “nah, not for that week” and he just let our bay (not the island) our bay be protected from bad weather and He gave us awesome weather. I was a leader in the team ‘operation cobra’ and we had the coolest little things we did and chants and stuff. On the second day we did synchronized swimming and our team won that. When I get pictures I will show you all our fabulous routine. Anyway in the end the cobras won and we were chuffed.
Ok so this is a long post so I will finish it off later. Next episode is about parachute… the biggest Christian music festival on the southern hemisphere (not that hard to achieve as there is nothing down here).
God Bless
Andrew
So right now I am still recovering from my summer of intense work (you will get the pun if you read it out loud) where I was camping in tents (hah get it?), playing sport in ridiculous heat and putting up marquees it ridiculous heat. Much of what I did over the summer was in ridiculous heat, whether it was really blazing hot sun heat or lots of cloud cover humid heat it was generally hot. So now I will tell all of you about what I did over the summer in a tad more detail but first to get something out the way, I have had the worst rugby watching weekend ever!!! Scotland sevens lost to like everyone (there was IRB rugby sevens on in Wellington this weekend) Scotland 15s lost to England and the Waikato Chiefs lost to the Brumbies…. Not fun!
Ok so I will take it from Christmas time. I got back from the south island safely and the next day I had a birthday party to attend and it was so much fun… on a bouncy castle. I probably lost like 10kg just on that day alone because bouncing is such hard work. So I rested for like a day then I was away to the first camp of the summer on the 31st of December! That is New Years Eve! So we had the leaders only day on the 31st and then all the campers arrived on new years day. It was a sports camp and was awesome but absolutely blazing heat the whole week. I don’t think I have ever drunk so much water and put on so much sunscreen… and I didn’t get burnt! The camp was for 15 – 17 year olds so the sport was pretty intense and competitive. Second day in I sprained my finger pretty bad and I could not play guitar! I was gutted. But the rest of the camp there was barely any injuries at all. My team did not win in the end but I think we had the most fun… with out winning. Some of the sports we played were:
Cricket
Football
Ultimate Frisbee (on the biggest field ever)
Volleyball
Indoor football
Netball
Aussie rules football (awesome game)
Touch rugby
Hockey
Softball
Mattress softball (best game ever – instead of bases you have piles of mattresses and you are out if you are in-between bases when the bowler gets the ball but if you are in the air you are fine… i.e. diving for the base)
American netball (rules of netball on an American football field and American football ball)
There is probably more but I can’t remember. So yeah that was a cool camp and I made some pretty cool friends, one of them is training with the tall blacks (the basketball team of NZ).
So then I had a three-day break (not long enough) and it was off to the second camp called Ponui Island Senior (original as). It was on an island on the east coast of Auckland. We took this big barge across and the place was awesome! It was basically a big beach where the main stuff happened. We were in tents but there was a hall and a kitchen and stuff… no real toilets. This camp was for 15-18 year olds and was really cool; it was just a really cool bunch of people. It was kind of hard being a leader when I was so close to the age of the campers but turned out alright, I just talked with a deeper voice (hah, hah someone asked if I was 26). The music was awesome at this camp and really loved the singing and stuff, but for the first few days I could not play guitar because of finger. We did loads of cool things and went on ‘tramps’ (walks) then camped out in random places, which was cool. The forecast all week was rain and not just hazy stuff like, rain of the drowning type but God must have been like “nah, not for that week” and he just let our bay (not the island) our bay be protected from bad weather and He gave us awesome weather. I was a leader in the team ‘operation cobra’ and we had the coolest little things we did and chants and stuff. On the second day we did synchronized swimming and our team won that. When I get pictures I will show you all our fabulous routine. Anyway in the end the cobras won and we were chuffed.
Ok so this is a long post so I will finish it off later. Next episode is about parachute… the biggest Christian music festival on the southern hemisphere (not that hard to achieve as there is nothing down here).
God Bless
Andrew
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Christmas Down Under!
Some pictures of travels in Queenstown over Christmas...
Queenstown Harbour
Jetboating just outside Queenstown!
This is a
jetboat like the
one I was in!
one I was in!
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