All Area Sports Day!

Our first full day was spent at the Young Life All Area Sports Day. We brought the sports equipment we gathered at home and set off to the venue for the day. We experienced our first YL African Club. For those of you familiar with YL, club was just like any Monday night club in the U.S. They had a mixer (game involving all of the kids), they called random kids up on stage to do funny embarrassing games, they sang current songs, they sang worship songs, and there was a talk at the end. For some reason I wasn't expecting it to be the same, but it seems the YL formula is the same all over the world. It was great to see the kids (high school age) getting excited and have such high energy.

The U.S. team was in charge of running each of the different sporting events. We were essentially the referees. This was our first interaction with the kids and it was fun to see how excited they were about meeting people from the U.S. We prayed the night before that we would be able to remember names because that means a lot to a kid when they know you care enough to remember their name. Liberia's main language is English, but they speak what is called Liberian English. Liberian English is essentially a mixture of English and some of their slang, and on top of their accents it can be hard to understand them sometimes. We did well though! And you could tell it delighted the kids to see that we knew them by name. It was the first time most of them had ever met an American, and for some the first time they had ever met a white person. There are many stereotypes of white people that Africans have and we made it one of our goals on the trip to break some of those. Showing Christ's love to these kids definitely broke some stereotypes.

 There were about 200 kids at the sports camp which was a great turnout.  Some of them we got to see later in the week at the Campaigner camp we put on. But more about that later :)

These were some of the neighbor kids who came and hung out with us all day. Absolutely precious :)