30 Hour Famine

I was going to update yesterday, but probably would have fallen asleep halfway through :)

30 Hour Famine was a great success! We had about 65 kids come, which was much less than Brandon had told us to anticipate, but still a great turnout. From these kids, we raised over $9300 for World Vision! Praise God!

Friday night, we met at church at 6. After registration, we opened with a praise and worship time. We had free time and played board games. 2 and a half hours of Monopoly....if I never have to play again, I'm fine! :) We also had a dodgeball tournament. My team got out after the first game. It's hard when you're in 6th grade, and are a little scared of the ball. (this isn't a dig at my teammates, but most of them were scared of getting hit, and throwing, the ball!) But it was still fun!

Around 11:30, we left to go Midnight Bowling. Oh what fun! I think I lost both games we played. No suprise there, but I didn't even break 100! We had a great time though! When we got back to church, Tori and I watched some of her videos from Haiti and looked at her pictures. All the other adult leaders had gone to bed so I think Brandon and I were the only ones up. Tori and Anna had already warned me that I wasn't going to be allowed to sleep, so I was prepared for an all-nighter. Anna fell asleep watching a movie and got quite a bit of sleep. Tori and I played DDR and just hung out until about 5:30 or so. I finally convinced some of the younger girls that they should get a couple of hours of sleep, so most everyone headed off to bed. Tori and I decided to give in and sleep for a couple hours around 5:45. Nice try. Sleeping in a cold room on a hard floor is close to impossible for me! I laid there for about 2.5 hours, getting up and walking around every once in a while. I couldn't sleep, so I got maybe 5 minutes of sleep! Surprisingly enough, I was not tired during the day!

At 10, we went out on our canned food drive. We collected food and other items to stock the pantry at LOVE INC. Our team came in second place for collecting food. We had a really good time and were impressed with how generous our community is!

Some kids went sledding later in the afternoon. Those of us who weren't brave enough stayed back at church and played games. The afternoon passed really slowly. I think it was because we knew we would be able to eat soon and the anticipation of that was so strong that it was all we could think about. Some of "my" girls wanted to watch a video, so we watched No Reservations (this is a great family-friendly movie). The only bad part was that it is about people working in a restaurant, so food was still on our minds.

After the movie, we had another praise time. And then.... PIZZA!!! I've done the famine before, but I don't remember being this hungry! Vitale's pizza sure hit the spot! It's already my favorite but I don't think I've ever had better pizza!

The Famine was a great time. And I think Brandon did a good job of helping the kids keep the focus on why we were doing it. Not for ourselves or to brag about what we could do or to have fun with our friends. But instead so that we could feel the hunger that those in 3rd world countries feel daily. We knew that we would get our next meal at 6:00, but kids in other countries may go 100 hours without food, and not know where their next meal is coming from. We had a lot of opportunities to point this out to the kids. And I'll admit, it was hard to be collecting food and going to the grocery store and seeing the food and smelling popcorn and yet knowing that we couldn't eat it!!