Day 1 nearly done!

 

Time for our first proper update…

Once again, thanks for all your prayers and good wishes for our Albany Team.  After a long journey by air and road, it’s great to have spent our first 24 hours at Christ the King Spiritual Life Centre, here in Greenwich, NY – which is where the Beaver Cross Camps are based.  

Saturday is the ‘in between’ day in that, while there is still work going on setting up for the next camp which begins tomorrow, there are no campers here.  That means it’s been a really good opportunity to get to know some of the Beaver Cross Staff who live on site during the Summer.

A good number of them are in High School or early College and so really close in age to many of our team, and it’s great to see bonds of friendship forming between the Americans and the Irish team already.

The first part of the day was set a aside for a bit of a lie in after a long journey, followed by the all important England Quarter Final.  Danny Hyde, who heads up the Youth Ministry in Albany Diocese, is an Englishman so the football was given high priority and the result went the right way!  It may not be so easy to see England’s next games as they’ll be when campers are on site!

We then had some orientation before a chance to do some shopping – picking up some essentials (everybody forgets something when they travel, after all) before visiting Wilton’s Mall in Saratoga.  Shopping might seem like a bit of a triviality on our first day, but for the onsite staff a bit of time away from the site is important as they won’t really leave it over the next six days!  Neither will we, so again this ‘down time’ was a chance to be in the company of our American friends and hosts.

Tonight, we head into Greenwich for a big fireworks celebration.  There is some debate as to whether this is to herald our arrival, to mark the significant England win or (more likely) because it’s 4th July Weekend!

The hope is that some of the team will write for this blog, but you can also look forward to lots of FB pics.  We don’t have our phones and devices with us when we’re about on the site, and there are very few places on this enormous 600+ acre site with web access, so we will work hard to make the most of what access we do get by keeping this blog and the DDYC Facebook page updated.

Please pray that we continue to be rested – a bit of a lie in was great, but it’s still been a long few days and things will get really busy tomorrow when Campers arrive!  Pray also for continued good health for the team – which we’ve generally had so far, and we want for that to continue.  Pray also that the kids coming to the Camps this week will be able to really grow into the sense of Community that they work hard to engender here at Beaver Cross, and that we will see many lives changed this week.

Adrian D