Greetings Everyone...okay, so I haven't written in a while, so I decided that I would take these few moments that I have during Dakota's naptime to say 'HELLO' and to tell you a little about my life the past couple of days. The 1st picture here is of a group from the University of Oregon and they are doing an opening activity that we do with most groups who come here for a teambuilding experience. We divide them into 2 (or more) groups and then we place two bags of materials in front of them and we ask them to make THE tallest chicken tower possible, it has to be free-standing, with the chicken on top. They have 5 minutes to do this and one rule is that everyone has to be involved. What happens is that the activity 'immediately' turns into a competition. When everyone is done and each team is conviced that they have the best chicken tower, we pull everyone together and we ask them again what the rules were that we gave. They repeat and then we ask them "what would have happened if your 2 groups would have worked TOGETHER"?. It's so fun to see people 'get it' when they realize that they could have pooled their resources and worked together. We use this opening activity to help them to see that we can accomplish more together than we can competing against each other. We use a term called 'coopetition', which is competition and cooperation put together and that is what we like to teach people who come to work with us.
The picture on the left is a sign built by one of our facilitators; we have several different signs posted throughout our wooded course.
Dakota's 3 year old pictures (3)
This is a picture of the group that I had the priviledge of working with on Saturday (yesterday) for 4 1/2 hours. They were from the Casa De Belen Homeless/Transitional home in Roseburg, Oregon, 3 hours away. Their director contacted us several weeks ago and asked if we would be willing to work with their group of teenagers and our director immediately said 'YES' and then asked if I would work with the group. With fear and trembling I said 'yes' as well, since I have little to NO experience working with troubled, nonetheless, homeless kids. Our staff, Kevin, Petra, and myself bonded very quickly with these kids and their staff and we had a great afternoon together. We talked about trust, serving each other, working together, putting others above yourself, and encouraging each other. I had to step out of my 'comfort zone' (which is what we teach others to do when they come here) to lead this group, but I have to say that God gave me wisdom and guidance and helped me every step of the time with these kids. We are looking at possibly taking a trip to visit their shelter/home in the future to work with the mothers of these teens and to connect with the teens and the volunteers of the home again. Look for our June Newsletter, we will be sending it out really soon. We'd love to hear from you and find out about your lives!!!
