the green spot blog

When a week or a weekend or a retreat at camp is over, kids will chatter all the way home about the horses or the challenge course or Ken's amazing food. But, really, it's the people, the community, that makes camp a great place to be. The zipline might be sweet and horses mights be amazing and the food might be mouth-watering goodness, but if the belayers aren't (safely) crazy and encouraging or the wranglers aren't friendly and fun or the meals aren't served by enthusiastic staffers ... well, it kind of takes something really important away from the experience. It sounds super cliché, but seriously team! Our people are our greatest asset. We're going to spend sometime this winter introducing you to our staff team. We don't get a lot of comments on our blog (Alyssa, Reilly, Lisa, Bethany ... 16 points each for commenting every so often) but I've still heard from a surprising number of people that our spring time posts about our spring staff team a...

A week and a bit ago, we had our annual Christmas Banquet. It was great fun to be joined for the evening by supporters, local friends and board members. We had a fun night! We were also pleased that our Christmas Banquet plans weren't mostly derailed by a snow storm, like they were last year ! In the kitchen, Ken had help from Jyle and Emily: making a delicious Christmas dinner, from the turkey to the stuffing to the carrots and the salad and fancy-pants homemade chutney! Jyle also devote great attention to the preparation of tasty Christmas baking! Colleen did a lovely job, decorating the dining hall in the manner of a Winter Wonderland. Kiah, Sydney, an armload of toque-clad teddy bears and our Evergreen moose all helped out. And our guests had a lovely evening (we think! we hope!) visiting, eating, playing Christmas games, carolling and playing board games.

Six months ago, we started sending out monthly updates to our supporting churches. It's probably time to start posting them online, too, isn't it? I'm going to post it as a .jpg file, although I'm not sure if this is the best way to go. I'm not computer savvy enough to figure out how to attach a .pdf file to a blog post. Anyone want to tell me how to do that? Leave a comment ...

A. is a lifer here at Evergreen. This summer, she spent three weeks at camp, for PUSH and Impact and she says they were the best three weeks of her summer! Here's A.'s story, in her own words: PUSH was almost more fun than Impact for a few reasons. With PUSH, you got to know and work with everyone and your group became pretty tight. Despite the fact that we did a ton of cleaning, it was all in how you looked at that made it fun. If you went into it thinking it was going to suck then it did, but if you went in looking for all the fun you could have then you would have fun. I even had fun cleaning urinals. There was one time were we got this idea to go into the outdoor bathrooms like the FBI, so we grabbed our spray bottles and rags and brushes and that good stuff. We would have one person leading and one crouched with someone else holding a spray bottle over their head ready to fight the grime. One morning our PUSH crew decided on what Koda would say if he could speak, it woul...

Allison (on the left) was a FANTASTIC addition to our staff team this summer. She was a stellar kitchen staffer and a great cabin leader. She also responded promptly and graciously when I asked for summer stories. So, without further ado, this is Allison's story: Hi! Hi! Something that I learned at camp. Should be an easy task, right? You would think so. This entire summer was a learning process for me. Some things were significant, like hot oil will literally disintegrate plastic containers and melt the cupboard doors in the kitchen. (Sorry, Ken!) Some things were not so significant, like no matter how fast you go in, how hot the day is, or how long you stay in for, the water in the creek is always cold. Always. But that’s not the kind of thing you’re looking for now, is it? I guess one of the most important things that I learned at camp, the thing I will remember the most, is that it’s okay to ask for help. No matter what you’re going through, no matter what you’re dealin...