Skills to pay the bills

I want to say sorry for not posting for a long time to every one who reads my blog. I either couldn't get on the internet or when I could I was just too lazy to post. This post about making a kamakura and sledding is one that I started to write on January 31st, but I haven't finished it untill today, March 3rd. It's been over a month. Anyways it's about what I did with the church boys.

While I had a sleepover with the church boys we made a kamakura( igloo sort of thing). Since this year it hasn't been snowing very much here in Aomori we had to gather snow from all around the church parking lot to make a kamakura. In previous years, there usually already was a big pile of snow that we could just start digging into, but this year we had to actually gather snow by ourselves. I knew that the boys would like to have a kamakura to see and go inside, so before all of them came I started making a pile of snow. When thier parents came and droped them off at the church they came over to where I was and guessed that I was making a kamakura. They said they wanted to help too, so they started digging snow away to make room inside. They worked on it untill we made pizzas for supper.

After we ate supper, did the dishes and had a devotion time we drove to the park by the river in town to go night sledding. As you can see from the picture above, we could still see grass on the ground. There was quite little snow even though it was January. We all sled down a lot of times and competed who could go the farthest. There wasn't as much snow than what we hoped we would have, but it was still fun. The boys also worked on the kamakura the next day and made a back entrance, too. Even though we couldn't make something big like last year, it was good that we could make this together this year.

I haven't posted in a long time, but that doesn't mean that nothing has happened. Ever since Christmas there has been New years celebration, Ski/snow camp, igloo making, sledding, Church Retreat and a bunch of other stuff, but for now I'm going to talk about the Church Retreat.

On the 20th and the 21st our church had a winter retreat. It was only for about 24 hours so we just stayed over one night, but it was still lots of fun. We stayed at a place called 岩木青少年スポーツセンター. It's a building that a big group of people can use for staying over and for doing events and such. I think it's run by the prefecture. It's quite a nice place with lots of space in the building and a good hill to play outside in the snow.

One of the things a lot of us enjoyed was sliding down a hill with a rubber tube. The center staff let us use black rubber donut shape type of tubes to slide down a hill. I've never done it before, but it was very fun. After going down several times the snow got harder so the course got faster and faster, by the second day everyone slid down the hill very fast. To be interesting we made a train by holding each others feet and sliding down the hill. Thanks to karl that suggested it. It was great fun.

We also played in the gym. we played Californian kick ball. That's what I heard it was called in English. Kids and adults both were in the teams and played together. At night we played games with many people till late.

We also had devotions and chapel times to read the Bible and learn about it. The theme of this retreat was neighborly love. So we discussed about how to love your neighbors and things like that.

On Sunday we had a service at the place in one of the big rooms. Some people just came for the service, but most of the people came from the day before and stayed till the end. It was a cool retreat having a fun time with kids and having a good time with people from church.