There is definitely something going around here…people have been falling sick all around us. Ashley and I both fought through the flu in the middle of June, and it came back last week and got Ashley again. The youth conference we attended was like a flu-breeding ground, and almost every other person who attended wound up shivering and coughing for at least a couple days.
The conference started on Saturday and went through Tuesday morning, but Ashley was under the weather by Monday afternoon, and didn’t come out for the last morning. The camp started that same evening at a different venue, and I went out there on my own. It was the first time we have been apart for the night. Not sure which of us had it worse-me at the freezing-cold camp with a bunch of youth making noise, or her at home coughing up a lung and shivering…actually I guess there isn’t much comparison at all. She came out to camp for a little while the next day but headed back to the house that evening. Finally on Thursday she came out to stay.
The national youth conference was 180+ youth from New Zealand and Australia staying at a local boarding school. It was an intense experience for us, since it was up to us to prepare and facilitate three workshops for all the participants, a task which neither of us had ever tackled before. We spent a lot of time putting together the workshops, and along with a group of about five or six others, we did our best to empower these youth with a vision for service and teaching. It did not go exactly as we had planned, but it did go…
The Radiant Youth Program was very similar to the camp we attended in April-same venue, a lot of the same youth attended-but this time, Ashley and I were the “adults in-charge”. There were thirty-one of us at the camp total, including the cook, her helpers and the four study circle tutors. We were graced with the presence of a wonderful artist named Grant Hinden-Miller. He ran workshops on dramatic presentations and story-telling. And of course he played lots of songs for us-he has many albums out and I LINK TO GOOD SONGS!
Ash is still carrying around a painful, dry cough, while I am still doing my best to stay healthy. I ain’t 100%, but since I spent the past twelve days with sick youths, I feel pretty good, relatively speaking. Now we are staying at the National Baha’i Center for a couple nights, because there are some other guests staying with our host, Caroline. The center is very nice, and one of the Baha’is from South Auckland is letting us use one of his vehicles at the moment. We went to Muriwai Beach together-last time I went alone, but we decided to leave before the sun set, a decision I regretted later as the sky turned orange and purple on the way home. The nice part is that I get to see sunsets at all, right?
