Camp Joy 2005

Building for the Kingdom

After waiting a whole year, the long expected CAMP Joy was another success for the youth of St. John's. The annual work camp in West Virginia stands for Christian Appalachian Mission Project Joining Other Youth. Two-thousand five marks the big 1-0 year for St. John's attendance at this week-long excursion of which alumni Jeremy and Brenden McDougal have attended all. Every year, youth groupers take a week out of their summers to give back to the less fortunate communities of Berkeley Springs and Paw Paw, West Virginia and Hancock, Maryland. Under the unity of 18 youth, we were able to complete all four of our work sites. All of our sites were located in Paw Paw this year, which meant a 45-minute drive everyday on a curvy road through the mountains.

One site was known for being the home of three and half year old named Couric. Members of our group were eager to improve his home as Couric ran around waving to the youth while in his super hero underwear. At his house, youth groupers built him a new deck and replaced its overhang under the instruction of Brenden McDougal. Upon the request of the homeowner, our crew also built a pergola so flowers could be hung around the new deck.

At another site, the smaller and/or younger crowd tarred the roof of Miss Donna's house. However, our deeds were tested with all the rain we got, so we came back to hear that the roof was leaking. Even though the roof was beyond repair, we went and tried to fill the holes in the roof with tar goop. Miss Donna and a couple of other local women were nice enough to make us a spaghetti lunch at the end of the week.

Across the street was another of our sites that was manned by alumni Jeremy McDougal and Rick Bradley. Here, we were assigned to replace two windows, and build a railing around the front porch and the stairs that descended from it.

Our final site consisted of scraping, scraping, and more scraping of a wrap around porch, which was then painted from top to bottom. Susan Flanders made an appearance at this site and also joined in the endless scraping.

This yeah, the theme for CAMP JOY was "Building for the Kingdom." This means that every church group had to perform a skit with this theme during vespers every evening (where we sing songs and talk about what groups accomplished at their sites). To demonstrate this theme, our youth group did a play off of "Tool Time" from the TV show "Home Improvement." In the skit, "Tim" wanted to build a very luxurious porch for the less fortunate homeowners in West Virginia, however as the character "Tim" always messes up construction projects, the porch was a disaster. The moral was that a plain porch is all the homeowner needs to be happy. They don't need an elaborate addition, but they are just appreciative that we would come out to help them. We concluded with a prayer, read by Katie St.Clair, that thanked God for the strength and support he gave us in fulfilling his plans and the great friendships and memories we have at CAMP JOY.

This year, the following 13 youth attended: Cory Refshauge-Jones, Cat Whitehead, Erin McDougal, Chris Bradley, Chris Nolfi, Ange Royall-Kahin, Woody Campbell, Sophie Mondale, Katie McDougal, Nick Kessler, Katie St.Clair, Tracy Campbell and Toni Curtin. We were pleased to have the help of five alumni who returned to CAMP JOY for the umpteenth time: Rick Bradley, Cynthia Grimes, John Wainright, Brenden McDougal, and Jeremy McDougal. From singing Disney songs at the top of our lungs to talking around the camp fire Friday night, we have wonderful memories to recount over the next year until CAMP JOY 2006 makes new ones for us. This CAMP JOY even more special because of our new addition!- Ijeoma Emenanjo, the new Youth Minister at St. John's. We were pleased to have him come for a couple days and witness his first night spent in a tent. Being able to spend more time with him helped us realize how happy we are to have him as our new youth director because we couldn't have asked for a better guy to take on the job.

Lastly, I would like to give a big thanks to the Chaperones who took off a week of work and sacrificed their warm comfortable beds to enable us to attend CAMP JOY this year: Jim Bradley, Doug Jones, Chris St.Clair, Terry Campbell, Nicole Hillman, Wendy Nogales, and Jerry McDougal.

Now for an abbreviated version of the prayer we used to close our vespers skit: We thank you Lord for these friends and families that surround and support us. Together, we are able to help build your kingdom and make small steps to make a better life for all. Thank you Lord, for another week of guidance and safety and we pray for many more to come.

That pretty much wraps up CAMP JOY 2005… CAMP JOY 2006 here we come!

- Ange Royall-Kahin (Youth Group member)