More Preparations

Summer at UrbanPromise is a wild, busy, and very crowded two months of screaming excitement. Hundreds of freedom-crazed kids, dozens of enthusiastic streetleaders, and almost fifty interns ranging from dazed to berserk, swarm around campsites throughout the city of Camden, playing games, laughing through skits, stumbling through crafts and Bible lessons, and shrieking camp songs at astonishing volumes. It's a time of forced growth, necessary faith, physical exhaustion, emotional turbulence, fast friends, and glasses-fogging heat. Reflection is impossible until, waking up from your thirty-six hour nap that began the second you left Camden, you finally have the time to comprehend that something just happened.

By all accounts the year-long program is of a very different nature. I'm living and working at the East Camden site, in the Rosedale After School Program, where UrbanPromise began its afterschool ministry. It's the same site where I worked the past two summers, but instead of five interns we have two, and instead of eighty kids we have forty. During the summer kids would arrive before 8:00 and peer in through the doors as we were meeting before camp. With school in session, we pick up our kids from the local elementary schools just before 3:00. Instead of rotating through all the grades for the same lessons, I have my own class, varying the lessons between literacy, bible, and creativity activities. Our mornings are devoted to building community and volunteering locally, providing opportunities to move beyond the confines of the UrbanPromise "bubble" and experience other elements of the community than we do with our kids.

Program officially begins on Tuesday. We have a dry run on Monday and in the interim I'm planning lessons, coloring classroom decorations, and searching for worksheets pretty much nonstop. Along those lines, if anyone ever has any ideas for activities having to do with literacy, arts, math, science, or music, please let me know and I will more than likely give them a try.

Thanks to all my friends and supporters!

Blessings,
Matt