Wednesday, July 26, 2006

FIESTA!!!

The Posse House

England has two seasons each year; Winter- ice cold, can't go outside, get as warm as you possibly can, 8 below zero kind of weather. And summer- constant heat wave that even though you have been waiting for it for the past 8 months it is somehow worse than the depressing cold.
I havent been able to sleep for about a week and a half now. I cant sleep in the heat and the house does not cool down at night (due to the fact that it was designed to reatin any and all heat it possibly can for 8 months of the year) there are no fans, no air con, I have felt constantly like I need a shower for the last week.
On the up side there are two or three weeks in the change-over period of these seasons which are very pleasant indeed. And the summer hollidays mean that everyone is back from uni and wants to hang out, sleep outside, do stuff and Light House is on.
Light House (summer kids club, runs for a week at the start of the summer hollidays) is awesome. I havent been going during the day, but im taking Friday off to go hang out, but at nite... there is FIESTA!!!
Fiesta is like a thankyou to the teenage leaders who have been helping at Light House as leaders through the week. Each nite there is a different "theme" and different youth workers from around the place come in to hang out and do a talk. I organised some games and then did a talk for Monday nite. Considering it is probably the largest group of people I have ever spoken to and I wrote my talk in about 2 hours just before the nite... it went really well.
I have had a long term dislike of public speaking but I did not get nervous at all this time, somehow remembered everything I wanted to say and said it in the rite order. The kids all listened so I must have done ok.
The Highlight of the nite was Pluck Off. One of the best things about my "by the seat of my pants" style of youth work is that I have plenty of room to be spontaneous. So when one of the kids asked if we were going to play Pluck Off it was like a wave of light at the genius of the idea inside my head.
For those of you asking "what the hell is pluck off?!", it is a game that works like this. All the guys sit in the middle of a circle of girls and link arms, legs, any body part they can get a decent grip on, and then the girls pluck them off (read: violently tear them apart) The only rule: No Bad Touching- dont touch what you havent got.
I got Andy to save me a spot next to him while I explained the game and then linked up with him quick smart before the wave of girls fell upon us. Twenty mins later me and Andy were the only two guys still holding on and the girls, having given up on actually managing to seperate us from our bear hug a while ago, were enlisting the rest of the boys who had been beaten to come and seperate us with crow bars.
Five mins later me and Andy are suspended between two groups of guys connected by a monkey grip on each others wrist. We will go down in Light House history for two things: 1. We are Tanks. 2. On the slideshow that nite there were about 30 photos of me and Andy in a bear hug (which is not so bad except that it was a kind of upside down bear hug which, while working really well, came up with some embarrasing photo's)
2nite we're filling up about 2000 water bombs... I'm gonna enjoy 2nite.

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