Box City
Today we got our schedule for the first week of the DTS. Looking it over we noticed that the kick off event suggested us to bring our sleeping bags. We arrived at the event a few hours early and learned how to play “Ninja.” Our goal was to hit other people’s hands to get them out of the game, but we only had one move to do it each turn. With all the mud around it is needless to say I (Andrew) got quite dirty. My initial strategy of jumping for the person farthest from me only turned out to be a complete failure. Too bad it took me three attempts to realize just how ineffective it was.
After dinner and an introduction of many of the different leaders a large German man stood up to speak. He then told the story of how the Marriage of the Arts DTS started. It was about a year ago during a DTS out reach to Ethiopia. The group decided to visit a large trash dump where they had seen kids rummaging through. What they found broke their hearts; young kids barely surviving off of the trash. Over the next while they developed relationships with the kids, sleeping where they slept and eating their food. Since then they have combining their different arts to bring in more help and funding for the ministry. Since then they have rescued a number of the kids and given them jobs. The way they intigrated their arts together to help these kids inspired them to start Marriage of the Arts DTS.
Flash forward to yesterday, we all stood an listened to this story. As they continued to talk it became clear that we were going to participate in a simulated garbage dump living situation. The staff made it clear that the exercise was completely optional, but that all of the staff would be participating with us. We all got boxes and started building a giant box city where we were going to be sleeping. The temperature had dropped quite low at this point and we were all shivering. It was quite a unique experience, luckily I had my sleeping bag to get into negating the cold factor. There were people though that did not use sleeping bags or any such comforts. For them the lesson was much deeper than for me though. It was a fun and exciting experience driving home the point that so many people live like this, even without the high tech sleeping equipment. The next morning i awoke stiff and tired but have some good memories to show for it.
great blog thank you