Church Camp 2010: Willow Park

This weekend our church had its first family camp at Willow Park Christian Camp out in Howick. The purpose of the camp was to encourage everyone to get to know other people at our church and also to just have some time to relax and have fun. We left home at around 6:45pm hoping to arrive at the camp by half past seven. Earlier in the day our car tyre was punctured by a screw, so we were still driving with a space saver tyre which meant we couldn’t drive faster than 80kmh. Still, we managed to get to the campsite just on 7:30! The location of the camp was really nice, with Bucklands Beach pretty much across the road from where we were staying.

[googleMap name="Willow Park Christian Camp" description="1 Hostel Access Road, Eastern Beach, Auckland" width="630" height="250" mousewheel="false" zoompancontrol="false" typecontrol="false" directions_to="false"]1 Hostel Access Road, Auckland New Zealand[/googleMap]

When we arrived, we were shown to our room upstairs by Sherman. We were allocated to Room 10 with Jireh, Andrew, Rayson and Bobby also together with us. We went back downstairs to meet up with everyone else outside and found them playing on the trampolines across the field. Jireh demonstrated how to do a forward flip on the trampoline while the rest of us looked on. I had a quick jump myself and although I attempted to do a forward flip, I landed on my back! Pretty scary experience at first though; I hadn’t ever tried that before!

The ice breaker game to help us get to know one another

The bell was rung and it was time for the official camp programme to start. We were all ushered into the auditorium where Gabrielle gave an introductory speech and welcomed us all to the camp. Camp programmes were handed around which included all the names of the people and their group numbers, as well as a timetable outlining the schedule of events during the weekend. After a few more introductions, Richard’s wife Michelle led us in a few ice-breaker activities. We all got out of our seats to mingle with people we didn’t know before we were split into two halves with a division down the centre aisle. For this activity we had to sit facing a curtain with someone from the other side facing us (but we couldn’t see them). When it was time, the curtain was dropped and we had to call out the name of the person sitting across from us. I was filming for most the time and it was pretty funny seeing the looks on people’s faces as they tried to scramble their mind for a name.

We were then asked to get into our concert groups (there were eight in total) to start planning for our performance at Saturday night’s concert. Four groups had to perform songs, while the other four had to present skits. I was in group eight along with most of the other people from Oddfellows, and we had to prepare a skit with the theme of “Welcoming new people to church”. It was nearly 10pm before we all headed back to the dining room to have supper. I had a cup of coffee to keep me awake (not knowing how long I was going to be staying up!) and we spent a while talking at a table. I also had a chat with Tim which was pretty interesting. The instruction we got from Gabrielle was that we had to go upstairs to our room at midnight so in the end we didn’t actually get to stay up that late to talk. Then again, Calum and I had to get up early in the morning anyway because I had to take him to Lincoln Heights so he could teach his recorder classes at 8:30am.

Willow Park Christian Camp is quite a nice venue

The first night of sleep was a little bit of a roller-coaster because I kept waking up. Maybe it was the fact that I was sleeping in my regular clothes, or maybe it was because I wasn’t used to the different environment. The first time I woke up I thought it was nearly time to get up but I didn’t feel like I had had enough sleep. It was only 3:50am. The second time I woke up it was nearly 6am. Trying to think about sleeping didn’t really help, which was a little strange because usually I find it really easy to fall asleep. Before long there were sounds of little children bellowing out in the hallway. Once they started up, I knew I wasn’t going to get anymore sleep. Calum and I left the camp just after 7:30am; I left the video camera in the trusty hands of Ray so he could film the morning programme while we were away.

We finally got the tyre replaced after half a day

As it turned out, we made it to West Auckland with 20 minutes to spare before 8:30 so we decided we’d take a quick detour through the McDonald’s drive-thru for breakfast. Little did we know that Calum’s hot chocolate would end up with a dead beetle inside! Yuck. After dropping Calum off at Lincoln Heights, I headed down to the car repair garage in Henderson Valley to see if I could get the tyre replaced. I must have arrived too early though, because everything was still closed when I arrived. I went back after going home for a shower and by that time they were open so I managed to get the tyre changed. Yay, now I didn’t have to worry about driving faster than 80kmh on the motorway!

The camp food was delicious!

Calum finished teaching at 11:30am so when I went to pick him up, we headed straight back to camp so we’d make it back in time for lunch at half past twelve. Our timing was pretty much perfect actually, because lunch was just about ready when we got back. It was my first meal at the camp since being there and I must say it was very nice! We had pork rib patties in bun with pasta, salad and beetroot! After lunch there was a little bit of free time so we headed to the gym to have a bit of a play. Some of the guys were playing with a soccer ball while the others were playing tennis without a net, playing random stuff on the piano and throwing around other balls. Later the rest of the people joined us down at the gym for the prepared group activities. There were four groups doing different activities in a rotation.

The group activities were crazy but fun

The activities consisted of: blowing flour off a plate in order to grab lollies with your mouth, transporting water by cupping it in your hands and balloon relays in partners and also with a stick. Sounds pretty crazy I know, but I think everyone had lots of fun. Most of the time I was filming and it was definitely a lot of fun watching them all looking silly. After the four activities I thought it was over, but I was wrong. We only stopped for a short break to have afternoon tea before we were back into it! The second round of activities was more about skill. Each group was given a number of plastic cups and the goal was to construct the highest tower of cups. There were many tumbles and crashes along the way, but in the end I think the winning tower was stacked 17 cups high!

The end of the group activities segwayed nicely into the soccer game we had during free time. Originally we were hoping to have a soccer game between the different fellowships at church, but it ended up being just mixed teams. I don’t know what the final score was but if we lost, I’m sure it wasn’t by that much We were all tired and exhausted after the soccer game but luckily it was just in time for dinner so we could all refuel.

'Welcoming new people' was the theme of our skit

The highly anticipated evening concert was held on Saturday night with all the eight groups performing their prepared presentations of songs and skits. It was pretty entertaining even though I couldn’t understand any of jokes in Chinese. The basic summary of our group’s skit was Calum, the church pastor, welcoming all sorts of stereotyped people to the church from emos to nerds to homeless people to druggies… I don’t know how I’d cope if our church had so many extreme stereotypes like that though!

We sang Shirley 'Happy Birthday'

After having a relatively early first night, we were all keen to stay up late on the second night. There were still quite a few people awake after supper, bantering away around tables in the dining room. It was also Shirley’s birthday so we gathered around to sing her happy birthday by the sofas. Gabrielle told us that we had to go upstairs to our room when the other fellowship decided to go to sleep. Since we found out earlier that the Canaan fellowship stayed up until 3am on the first night, we thought we’d still have ages to talk. Unfortunately for us, the other fellowship decided to go to sleep just after 12:30am so we were pretty gutted because we knew we couldn’t stay up for much longer. We savoured the remaining minutes we had together before we skittered upstairs back to our rooms.

We had the Sunday service in the auditorium

The final day at camp on the Sunday was more or less a wind down to the weekend. More people arrived at the camp in the morning for the church service that was held in the auditorium. Ada gave the sermon while Sherman was the translator. Before lunch we also had another time for group activities. This time each group had to collect items that were called out by the person running the game. The items on the list (such as belts, necklasses etc) then had to be used to dress up a volunteering member in each group, who then had to parade across the stage in a makeshift fashion show. Hamish was the model for his group, brave man!

The whole camp was over in less than three days but it had felt so much longer. On the drive home from camp I started thinking about Uni again and how long ago it seemed since my last lecture. I don’t feel like going back to Uni so soon; it feels like I should still be on holiday. Overall I think the church camp was definitely a great way to spend a weekend away from home and relax. I wish we could have more weekends away like that!