SoFa

SoFa stands for Sommerlager familie. In other words family camp! This was our first family camp with the church. Our youth pastor and his wife organize (with an army of helpers ) youth camps every year. They have teens for 10 days then have a few days break then they have kids (9-12 years) for 7 days. This year they decided to do families in between.
The campsite is in a big field on top a hill about 25minutes outside of Freiburg. The field belongs to a farmer who allows our church to use it for the month of August. The camp gets water and power from the farm which is just down the hill. It is amazing what they set up and how it all functions! There are 'real' flushing toilettes and a kitchen capable of cooking for 100-150 people. And it is all temporary, they build it all at the end of July beginning of August, and break it all down at the end of August. It is a lot of work, but when you see the fruit in the lives of the youth and kids, it is well worth it.
For the youth camps last year it rained pretty much non-stop and was cold. This year they had nice weather for the teens, but it started raining before family camp and rained the first day and a half. Needless to say there was a lot of mud! The kids thought it was great of course, and we adults had to just remember that 'washing machines are made to wash clothes' (and let me tell you, I had a TON of laundry when we got home!)
But mud aside, it was a great time. Saturday and Sunday morning there was child care and the parents had time together and the topic was raising kids. The discussions were very 'open', everyone was comfortable with one another and shared things from their lives. It was encouraging and challenging.
In the evenings we had a campfire where we roasted marshmellows the first night and the second night we made pancakes. We played a game where we had two teams, some from each team had to go into the forest and 'find' the ingredients for pancakes. There were people hiding in the woods holding the ingredients and our teams had to find them (the ones hiding were flashing their flashlights). They were only allowed to get one ingredient at a time, ie one egg, 1 cup of flour, a bit of oil, or a liter of milk. Once they collected the items they had to run them to us who were making the batter and there were others trying to catch them. If they got caught they had to give up whatever ingredient they had. It is very hard to make pancake batter when you get the ingredients all mixed up! It was a lot of fun and the pancakes were really yummy!
After 3 nights sleeping in a tent on the ground I was happy to sleep in my own bed though!

P.S.
All the awnings and tents and other wooden things were all made by the teens while they were there. That is part of SoLa, they get to design and build anything they can imagine, and some of it is really cool! There was even a swing this time (I'll try to remember to take a picture this week when we visit the kids camp)