A Weekend of Service

Back in January, Jon and I volunteered to be a "Ma & Pa" for our church's "Trek" camp scheduled this summer.  We were so excited to dress up like pioneers and lead a "family" of youth around pulling a handcart and reenacting other pioneer-ish type things.  However, plans got changed when a week before the camp was supposed to happen things got wet around here.  Like really wet.  Like flooded wet.  So instead of going camping, all the youth, leaders, and other volunteers spent the planned camping day giving service and cleaning up after the floods.  Which actually turned out to be a great experience and was relatable to the previous plans of trekking, since the pioneers were known to give service to other groups who were in trouble crossing rivers or being caught in snow storms.

Our first day was spent cleaning up at Camp Gardner, a Scouts Canada campsite located east of Calgary.  We spent hours wandering around the seemingly endless acres of the forested campsite looking for things that the flood waters had swept away.  Things like 2x4's, picnic tables, benches, fire pits, and so on.  Those were then hauled back to the campsite and thrown in to a bin.

I'll admit I was a crummy helper.  I couldn't help but walk around with my jaw dropped and camera clicking, taking in how much the landscape has been infinitely changed by something as simple as water.  Hundreds of thousands of litres of quickly moving, silt-filled, treacherous water.  What used to be soft and supple forest floor, carpeted with moss and pine needles is now comparable to something like sand dunes, just of a smaller scale and composed completely of clay.

Not only has the terrain been altered, many trees have been shoved over or covered with a silty clayish mixture of twigs and stones.

I wish I could have better captured what this flood has done.  It feels so surreal to have had a natural disaster sweep through the place I live.  

Today we spent the day out in Bragg Creek.  We cleaned out a restaurant that was supposed to have it's grand opening this weekend.  Everything is now totalled.  We spent a few hours organizing, boxing, and labelling donations.  I think my faith in humanity has been restored after seeing how much has been freely given to help those in need.  The community centre gym was filled to the rafters with clothing, food, toiletries, cleaning supplies, and so on.  Our last project was spent shovelling the layer of clayish sludge that covered the ground of a person's home and business.

Although I was pretty bummed that a fun weekend of camping got changed to a weekend of hard work, I'm so glad this is how things worked out.  The youth in our group were so optimistic and fun to work with.  They really taught me how to better give service.  And Jon was such a trooper too!