Two Posts in One... Saturday & Sunday update

I think this is probably going to start being a trend. Once again I'm policing the “lights out” policy and typing the day's blog post. So, although your information is going to be about a day behind, you'll probably get more frequent updates than if I were looking for a time to type for fifteen or twenty minutes on a computer here with internet access.

I'm kind of disappointed – the stud athlete on my team busted up his knee playing “running bases” today. So, our run towards camp glory may, once again, be cut short due to the injury of a key player. Rats. Actually, seriously, I feel bad for the kid. I guess up until about 6 weeks ago he was on crutches with another injury, and now he's probably going to be out of commission again for a while. At least he's putting a pretty good face on it.

Otherwise, life really is pretty good. I finally got about an hour of the waking day to just crash, alone, and relax. It was, at this point, well needed, and very gratefully received! I'm loving my time with the campers, and I wish I had more time with them than I do. I can't believe that they leave next weekend already.

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This is going to be two posts. I didn't really have time to upload my post from yesterday so my post from Saturday night is the one above, and what follows is the Sunday update.

Sunday was actually a really good day, despite my not really having any free time so to speak of. Camp Sundays consist of busing the kids down to church – BFCF the English speaking church thats attached to the Black Forest Academy, and then the kids having lots of free time, and usually watching a movie. So, the kids get a chance to unwind on Sunday, which leaves less free time for the staff (For example... I'm “off” when the kids are in English class for a couple of hours during the day... which means I try, as best as I can, to fulfill the role of “team leader” in that margin as well as other times during the day). I also, usually like to try to take at least a few minutes of “Steve” time sometime during the day (Preferably during my free time) where I can just unwind for a bit, get a few minutes of peace and quite, and read for a while. But getting to spend extra time with the campers, just hanging out, was really awesome. And despite not having any “free time” for myself on the Sunday docket, it turns into one of my favorite days of camp.

Oh... the kid who smacked his knee the other day is doing well. He's walking around without crutches, so we're all very happy that the injury wasn't as bad as we first thought it might be. Which is a huge answer to prayer for a lot of people.

I had an interesting room time with my guys yesterday night. We had watched the new “Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” movie yesterday evening as a camp, and talked a little bit about how the movie can be interpreted in light of the story of Christ. I thought it was really interesting that my guys pretty much uniformly had seen, and liked Mel Gibson's “The Passion of the Christ” better than the disney film... partly because they felt Disney had stronger ulterior motives for making the film (Making a lot of money off of it), whereas Gibson's movie didn't. The other half of their preference was because they felt the Narnia film was a bit too “fantastical” to be a good portrayal of the Christian story. I'm not saying I agree with them %100, and I'm not trying to push their view... but I am proud of them for coming up with an opinion on how their beliefs are treated in the media and for sticking too it (the guys who were talking about it are Christians... and for those of you who know me I didn't “seed” that opinion in them, and I wasn't trying in any way to take the conversation towards critiquing the film, or the film industry at all. It came up completely spontaneously and I barely commented on the whole matter). So that being said, I'm incredibly proud of my boys for having an opinion on something like this, sharing it, and then sticking to their guns on it and giving adequate, logical evidence to support their views. (and I think they both know they're not trying to delineate between good and bad, but better and best... which is also exciting).

The door is open and I'm listening to campers that I'm going to have to bust in the next few minutes for being too loud again. One full day of camp is over. Despite a few road-bumps, it still feels great to be here.

Its always a pretty honest answer to tell campers that their camp is not better or worse than the last one, only different. Unfortunately I think if I tell the next group that, it may be a lie. I know I posted yesterday that I knew over half the kids at this camp. The truth of the matter is that if I made a list of all of the previous campers who I'd worked with, who would still be eligible to come to camp, this camp would have the vast majority of them all in one place. I'm constantly being blessed by the kids and the other staff, despite my shortcomings.

Campers Arrived

I'm going to try something new – I'm writing this blog post at night while policing my hall. The kids are, for the most part, quite and there's only a few kids that I'll have to move down the hall and bust. Unfortunately I don't have internet access in my room and have to go downstairs to get any. So by the time this is posted it will most likely be “the next morning” over here, and sometime in the middle of the night in The States.

The campers came today. It was a trickle, almost the whole day, rather than a rush all at once. The first group showed up around 2:00, and a small group would make it to the campsite every hour and a half or so, until the last group of five, which didn't arrive until 11:30 at night.

Its great to have them here, and its even better to have so many familiar faces around. I know probably about half of the campers from previous camps personally, and there are others that I know through reputation. I realize that I'm a staff member and they're campers, but for some of them I can't escape the feeling that I'm catching up with old friends, rather than policing a force of unruly teenagers. And the truth is that I think this is the most comfortable I've felt at the start of a camp yet – we'll see how long that lasts (even the best of kids can do some pretty crazy things at times).

I have a good feeling about this camp. The group of kids is great, I'm actually already sad that they'll be leaving next weekend – I wish we just had more time with them. Some of these kids, it'll probably be the last chance I get to see. They'll be too old to come to camp next year, and who knows what I'll be doing a summer from now. Some of them have kind of grown up through the camps with me. A couple of them I met at my very first camp, and I couldn't be happier that I get a chance to be with them again.

Its Been Awhile

Since I've gone and written a blog post. Sorry about that. The past few days have been crazy getting staff members situated, and getting the locations ready for camp to start. Its been really fun getting to know the teams and interacting with them, in person, for the first time. I'm constantly amazed that I'm over here.

Today is the day when campers show up. We've got a morning of relative peace, and quiet, and then an afternoon of crazy frantic energy. So between now and next weekend life goes, "crazy-go-nuts." Hopefully I'll be able to carve out a few minutes of the day in order to keep blogging.

Yesterday we had a chance to go to Strassbourg, a city on the French side of the Rhine, in Alsace, take a boat tour on the canals there, and then walk around the city for a couple of hours. I'm constantly amazed at the beauty of Baden and Alsace, and how great the people (overall) are here. Strassbourg is a really neat city - the cathedral is absolutely gorgeous, as is the other older architecture. The cafe's were overpriced (welcome to a touristy city in France...), but the atmostphere was nice. It was nice to be able to watch Le Tour de France on a flatscreen TV while sipping a drink and chatting.

So... I've got to get off. Its time to finish prepping for the kids to get here.

Engines sputter ghosts over gasoline fumes

I had a strange experience today. It was raining when I left work at the Janz Team offices, and as I walked down towards the appartment for the last time before camps start the rain started to pick up. As I picked my way through the Fussgangerzone (pedestrian zones), watching water water drip off the tops of roofs and walls, I could tell the rain was coming down harder, and the lightning and thunder were getting closer. When I finally got back onto the main streets about one hundred meters away from the apartment the rain started hurling itself down in gales, and I grasped what it meant for the rain to fall on the righteous and the wicked. And despite being drenched, for the rest of the walk I knew genuine joy.

Grocery Shopping

A couple hours and about 2000 Euro later most of the food for camp session is bought and stocked at the dorms. It took us the better part of the day to load and deliver the food for three camp sessions, but I can't say that it was a particularly bad experience. Actually, on the contrary, it was kind of fun. And the anticipation of camp starting next week is starting to really get me excited. On one hand there's a lot of stress involved in making sure that everything is ready for people to start showing up. On the other hand this is what we've been working toward since before I arrived in Germany.

There's only a couple days left, and a couple of days worth of last minute preperation to do before the greater Kandern area gets flooded with a lot of teenage energy!

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Alright... before I get going on this post, I'd like to start with a quick anecdote that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of what I'm gong to write this evening. I went into the bakery across the street this morning to buy my bakery for the day. I ended up having to wait a minute or two for someone to be available to take my order, and when someone finally was it was one of the bakers who had come out of the kitchen to lend a hand in serving people. We ended up talking for a minute or two, aside from my ordering, and almost immediately he asked if I were French... If this were an isolated incident I probably would have laughed it off and not have thought about it again, but this is at least the second time somebody thought I was French. On the Air France flight from Newark to Paris the flight attendant thought I was too - he started coming down the isle speaking English to everyone, until he got to me when he proceeded to start speaking to me in French... (to which I responded with a slightly confused, "I'll take the beef tips, merci). So in the end I ended up chatting with the baker about where I was from, where/how I learned my German, etc. But what I still can't wrap my mind around is why people would think I'm French! I'm not wafer thin, I don't wear tight pants, I don't walk around in black sweaters smoking a pipe and spouting existential philosophy (well the philosophy part maybe). But seriously - What part of chubby kid wearing an American T-Shirt, American-cut jeans, Puma tennis shoes, and speaking German screams "French?" Not to bash the baker, actually he's a super nice guy, and I can't say enough good things about the bakery/konditorei. (I've actually gotten a couple ideas for bread/rolls that I could make when I get back).

Now, on to what I've been thinking about for the past few days. I pulled the title for this post from the Daft Punk song "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." The song is an electro-pop song where the band slowly builds up their only verse from individual scattered words to an entire verse - "Work it harder, make it better/ Do it faster, makes us stronger/ More than ever, hour after/ Hour work is never over." It struck me the other day how good of a piece of "pop" art this really is, and how it subtly shows what they feel to be a problem in modern society.

I have no idea who's reading this, but let me make a suggestion - this next part will make a lot more sense if you do this first, and you'll probably have a slightly better appreciation for whats being done if you try this first yourself. Find a copy of the song - \its one of the songs I have playing on the blog "playlist" you can get to it directly by using clicking the button to make it a pop out player. Following the directions to make that work, and then selecting the song from the list (its relatively near the top)... oh yeah, and be sure to hit the stop button on the blog player... just so you don't have two things playing at once. Take the time and listen to Harder, Better, Faster Stronger, a few times and try to decide what it means ---> I promise there's a meaning there, it may be a bit tough to coax it out of the song, and you'll have to think about everything going on in the song to really get it, and then read on. (and I'm going to say before hand too, that this isn't entirely original criticism of the song... In other words, I'm not the first person to say most of this stuff, and I'm not claiming to be... If I knew the first person to flush this out I would give him/her their just due).


If you just read the single verse that I pasted in, what I just said probably doesn't make much sense, but I'll try to explain. The song starts with a filtered melodic beat that acts as the rhythmic engine that moves the song along. After about 50 seconds of looped beat, an electronically filtered voice starts saying words that will make up the completed verse. It woudl read roughly "Work it, make it, do it, makes us harder, better, faster, stronger. More than hour, hour, never ever after work is over." What's interesting here is that, although the voice is filtered and is speaking in relatively broken sentence, the work being done ends. Also the work makes the workers "harder, better, faster, stronger."

Now, as the song goes on, more words are added into the mix in a very mechanical way. As words get added, the beat changes, as does the filtering on the voice. As the voice progresses towards building the verse, and begins singing it over and over it becomes more and more distorted, until it begins to fragment and become dehumanized (for lack of a better word), and in the end only a few of the words are understandable --> most notably "(h)our work is never over."

So, I said this has do to with pointing out a problem in society. At this point the fairly obvious answer is that as we work more and more we go crazier, and crazier. This is definitely a message in the song... but its a partial one, and you've really missed the heart of whats going on if you just leave it at that. Here's where it seperates itself from petty drivel, and puts itself into the realm of legitimate (or semi-legitimate) pop art.

If you follow the progression of the song you start with the work being done enriching the workers - it is something that makes them Harder, better, faster, and stronger. However as the very mechanical way that it builds continues forewards, the work is never over, and the product and the process rather than the worker becomes "harder, better, faster, stronger." Thats the main inversion that this song works on, work defining and enhancing the life of a person, which as the song becomes "industrialized" the speaker is caught up in a whole process that ends up dehumanizing everything, and the work becomes our main goal rather than living our lives. Finally, in the end the only thing left in a splintered, and fragmented existence is the work that's never over.

The question that we then have to ask is whether this is an accuratate picture of what goes on in society, and then, if it is, what should we do about it. Although it may not be true all of the time, and for all people living in the developed world, a lot of times our way of life is based on people doing work that can do this to them. So the question then becomes what should we do, and therein lies the rub.

There's no easy answer to the quesiton. What do we do when our quest for profit becomes damaging to others, when there is a clear looser in our "competition" for market dominance, when we pay monetarily little for our products but the toll in human misery can be great. Obviously starting a Marxist society has been proven to not work... (yes, I realize that may be the understatement of the year), but at the same time if we have an ounce of Christ's compassion we can't turn a blind eye to the suffering of those who have gotten the short end of the capitalistic stick. My hope, really, is that this would become one of the jobs the church takes on in the 21st century, that we would be willing to look at these kinds of problems, not with the eyes of American, or western socio-economic interest, but with the eyes of Christ and in doing so come up with inventive ways to help people where they are doing what they're doing.

That being said, Daft Punk, (So far as I know) are in no way christian, or any other religion for that matter. And I'm not holding them up, on the whole, as being a bastian of great art. I honestly don't know their other stuff well enough to say much of anything about them. And I'm not trying to hold this up as one of the best examples of contemporary art... but this song is one that does do a good job of showing, rather than blatantly telling, and showing us something that we'd rather forget about what it can sometimes cost to live the way that we do, and that is why it is worthwhile to listen to/pay attention to.

Victory

Germany won the baseball game against France today 11:1. All is right in the universe. Actually, in all honesty, it felt like watching a high school game back home. The only thing keeping the fans from the players was a line of chain-link fencing, and the dugout walls, there was nothing to keep foul balls from screaming over our heads, and neither team looked all that good, which I guess is understandable due to Baseball's dearth of popularity over here. (Although Germany looked considerably better than France).
In other news. Today was also the big push to get all of the dinner rolls and pies done. When I left Palmgarten this afternoon the pies were done, and there was only about a double batch of dinner rolls left to flash freeze. (Not bad considering I made 7 double batches of our dough recipe this morning). It was actually a really good time. We ended up getting some help from a work team thats here from Canada, and some BFA kids who live in town.
I'm constantly amazed at how awesome the BFA kids are - I've had a chance to work with a solid handful now between different times I've been to English camp, and I always, always come away amazed at how great they are to work with.

I'm going to watch the German National team

So... with all I've been saying here about soccer this might come as a bit of a shock to anyone reading this. Tomorrow the German national team is playing in a town about half an hour from here and I get to go watch. The catch? Its the German national baseball team. Thats right, I've come all the way across the big pond, only to find myself going to watch an American past time. So tomorrow evening (alright... mid-day for you guys) I get to go watch the German national team face off against the French. I hope we smear 'em.

Apples Apples Everywhere

SO I went on a bit of an adventure yesterday. One of the plans that we made for English camps was to bake Apple Pies for everyone as part of the North American experience. (Right... what could be more American than baseball and apple pie, right)? The plan: make about 40 apple pies, freeze them until needed, and then bake them in the oven. Pretty simple, right? err... not so much. Big problem number one was faced down yesterday: finding all of the apples we would need.
We, (Lisa Rothacker, a Cedarville Student, who like me, is here to help out for the summer, and myself) set out at about 11:00 am on the great E-Camp apple hunting expedition. We returned 45 kilometers, 7 grocery stores, and 30 dozen apples later at around 2:30. Apples, in and of themselves, are not hard to find over here but when you need about 360 Granny Smiths the gravity of the situation begins to set in. We had the back of a Passat station wagon pretty full with tart green appely goodness.


The looks we got from the cashiers were pretty priceless. As we were walking out of one store with a mere 3 dozen Granny Smiths (all they had in stock) we got a raised eyebrow and a, "so, are you throwing an 'apple party?'" More impressive was the relatively straight face we got while purchasing a whopping 15 dozen at another store. After explaining what was going on in most of the stores we generally got the response "oh... thats pretty cool," or "that sounds like fun," so in the end most of the awkwardness of buying out a store's stock of Granny Smiths was averted.