Last night, during our nightly debrief, I asked the team to be prepared to expect only a handful of kids for the next day’s fishing derby program. Most of the reserve’s children were away this week at a conference at Constance Lake, and the nursery kids had the day off because their supervisors had a staff meeting to attend.
After lunch, we arrived at Ginoogaming #77 around 1:00 pm. It was no surprise that there were no kids to be found at the reserve’s health centre, where we usually helped out with the youth program. So, we enlisted some of the teen helpers on the reserve, and divided ourselves into two teams to walk around the entire reserve to look for children, and to see if they were interested in joining us for the fishing derby. While we walked around, I used the time to get to know one of the teen helpers, L. She was only 15, and she was interested in going to college after high school. She didn’t know what she wanted to study, but she mentioned that the government would pay for tuition. I asked her if many of the graduates enrolled in university after high school, and she said, “No”.
The reserve was shaped like the figure 8, and we managed to gather about 4 kids. We eventually met up with the other half of our team. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to find any kids – they should have teamed up with some of the teen helpers, because without them, we wouldn’t have known which houses had kids that were staying home today : ) However, the other team did manage to speak to a few parents, and the team members found out that the parents knew we were visitors from Toronto. Eventually, we managed to round up a few more kids on our way to the bridge that was just outside of the reserve. This bridge was a great location to catch Walleye, Pike, and even Perch. It was pretty hot today, and the fish weren’t really biting. It was a good reminder that we weren’t really here to catch fish, rather men for the Lord (Matthew 4:19)!
We invited several guests for dinner, and I was so glad to finally see J. We had a good time catching up and sharing about each of our families. Tonight was also the first time Pastor J joined us for dinner, and had a chance to meet the new team members. I was so proud of the team members that were cooking tonight, because they were able to feed so many guests, and even whip up a couple of dishes from scratch, when we were running out of food. I was most proud of the kids on our team, Andrew and Daniel, because they stepped up, and helped supervise the other children that came for dinner while we were all busy fellowshipping with the adults. Nadine, Taketo, and I shared funny moments from our respective weddings, and it was a great time just sharing and learning about the cultural differences between our First Nations friends and the members of our team. Toward the end of the evening, we handed out the remaining gifts that we had for our guests, and hugged and thanked them for joining us for dinner.
Posted by Dominic
Walking around Ginoogaming #77
The Fishing Derby
Another beautiful day on Long Lake
Together again!
Mastering the art of eating with chopsticks!
1 comment:
hey that is me hahaha
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