Summer Camp

At long last, the report from camp!!! I had a great summer. Hard, but great.


Bienvenue à Teen Ranch! (welcome to Teen Ranch!) That building straight ahead to the left houses the staff dormitory, the kitchen, the dining room, and the laundry room. We usually ate outside in the covered area. Just to the right of that building is the office, the saloon, and the "toilette block," a collection of toilets especially prone to getting plugged. To the right of that is the chapel and "shower block," and on the far right you can see the new dormitory being built.


Here is the girl's dorm and one of the tipis for the boys. Aren't the tipis cool? In the background you can see the tent where most of the chapel services and evening gatherings are held.


Here are all of the tipis, the soccer field, the volleyball court, and the basketball court. I took this panoramic photo from the second floor balcony of the dormitory-in-progress.


This is the second half of the panoramic photo, looking towards the entry (the first picture). You can see the roofs of the staff building and office on the right.

Well, now you have a feel for the place. Let's meet some of the people.


I met a lot of great people, obviously more than on in this image. These are some of the people who stuck out in my head (and happened to be there when I had a camera!). If they show up in multiple pictures, you know I saw them a lot! The writing on our cooking hats in the one picture means "our favorite chef." Our chef is the one with the writing on his shirt, and we made him a cake to cheer him up when his wife had to go on a trip for several weeks.


This is Granite, the cat we adopted. He snuck into the laundry room one night and nearly gave me a heart attack the next morning when something came to life 3 inches from my elbow.

So what kind of stuff did I do? Well,


I cleaned showers, toilets, sinks, and floors. I have seen it all. Hair, puke, mud, backed-up sewers...


I miss doing dishes with my friends. Call me crazy, but we had some fun. We usually sang songs while we worked.


I led "all-terrain bicycle" expeditions for the kids. There are paths covering the French countryside like a giant spiderweb. They start out as roads and then get smaller and smaller, and pretty soon you can only keep going on horseback or bicycle.


We also had a BMX course. BMX bikes feel unnatural to me, but I liked riding the course with the kids on the VTTs (mountain bikes)


I spent two weeks in the kitchen working as an assistant chef. Nobody died of food poisoning.


I started a good percentage of the campfires (and other fires). I was also one of the few people who knew how to disarm the fire alarm. Coincidence? I think not.


For three weeks I was in charge of putting a tipi to bed each night. Since these guys were between the ages of 13 and 15, that didn't mean hot cocoa and a cookie (though they probably would not have objected). Each night we discussed the day and I tried to get them engaged in ameaningful conversation about God, the purpose of life, or the challenges of being a young man.


For one week I was also a counselor. It was challenging but very good. It helped my French and it stretched me a lot. I think God used it to help me to mature and to love people more.


I fixed toilets. When a valve wore out they sent me to this treasure trove to find a replacement.


Between the VTT and the BMX we destroyed bicycles at a frightening rate. Three of these were broken going into week 4 and by the grace of God I got them rolling again. One of them got destroyed on its second trip back in service and I had to fix it a second time. I also fixed a lot of flat tires. It was a great learning experience.


Nah, this is staged. But there were some bikes that were beyond my ability to repair, especially as the summer wore on and we used up all of our salvageable parts. Gear shifting systems were in especially short supply.


For my last two weeks we worked on a new dorm. First we sanded the walls and then we applied two different types of fire-retardent venire (They work- we checked!). We got to wear these cool face masks that made us look like ducks:


and I noticed that

America has left its mark on the French construction industry.

I did a lot of other things this summer for which I have no photos. I really wish I had pictures of the times I unplugged toilets with my hand. Or the day we hauled a bunch of logs out of the paintball arena. I felt like Paul Bunyan; some of them were 9 or 10 feet long! And then there was the path that I cut through the a jungle of super-weeds with the weed-wacker so the electric fence would work again. That was cool too.

But of course we didn't work all the time. In my spare time,


I went horseback riding for the first, second, and third times in my life. I even did a little bit of galloping.


L'Ardèche is beautiful. I loved to wander through the woods on my time off.


Every Friday we had a campfire. Usually it was with the campers but this particular fire was just the staff. We sang some French songs, sometimes we just chatted. We also burned marshmellows. French marshmellows don't roast.


One weekend we went to an "international" rodeo. Nearly all rodeo people are Americans. It was like a big version of the county fair, with lots of stands selling "American" stuff. These patches were being sold for high prices (I don't remember how much) and I was thrilled to see that Albert Lee made it into the completely random collection. Too bad I didn't have anything American with me; I could have sold it to the guy and made a profit. For supper I had steak (REAL steak) and french fries. It was FANTASTIC.


The staff celebrated July 14th (the French version of the 4th) by going to see the fireworks in town.


We ate a lot because it was SUPER GOOD! This was during one of the work weeks again, which is why there were no campers.

It was a great summer. I am glad it was a lot of work, or it would have been even harder to see it end.