Bailey and I spent Friday and Saturday at Camp Linden. We were attending a good old-fashioned GA camp. For those of you who didn't grow up Southern Baptist, that stands for Girls in Action, and it's an organization that is part of the Women's Missionary Union (WMU.) I grew up in GAs, and went to GA camp several years. Back then it lasted a whole week, and I went to Camp Carson, which is in East Tennessee. But there were tons of similarities and it brought back a lot of memories for me.

The reason we were there is because the theme for the weekend was "Adventures in Asia." The girls were hopefully there to learn a little bit about missions in Asia. A few weeks ago, Pastor Reverend Kim Cox e-mailed me and asked if I would be willing to go and teach about India. Although I felt a little bit underqualified as a missionary to India, I agreed to go. A couple of days ago, the lady in charge said that Bailey was welcome to come with me if she wanted. I asked her if she'd like to go and she was SO excited. It ended up being a great Mommy/Bailey time together.
Friday night after the opening ceremony type things were complete, there was lots of fun time out on the playground and going to the camp store. We also had a campfire, which wouldn't have been complete without S'mores. Bailey was extremely pleased with this.

She and I slept in the same bed that night, which basically means she slept and I tossed and turned. Bailey is like an octopus when she sleeps. An octopus with really sharp elbows. She was all over the place. I figured since I was there to talk about India, not getting any sleep was a pretty accurate remember of what being there was like for me.

Saturday morning was called "Passport to Asia." The girls rotated around between India, China, The Phillippines and Japan for 20-minute sessions. I didn't have a whole lot of stuff to show, since we spent very little time shopping while I was there, but the outfit was a hit.

After a basic introduction of who I was and why I had the privilege of sharing about India, I asked the girls if they remembered from the night before how many people live in Asia. (4 billion) Out of that 4 billion, I asked them to guess how many of those were in India. (1.1 billion) In order to try and illustrate how many that is, I had three girls get in the square on the right. I told them that they each represented 100 million people, and that they lived in the United States of America. Even though it's summer, most of them were able to do the math and determine that around 300 million people live in this great nation of ours.

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I then had the rest of the girls and enough adult helpers as needed to reach 11 people get into the square on the left. I told them they also represented 100 million people each. They were pretty squished in that square.

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Then I told them there was a problem with my illustration, and the problem was that India and America are not the same size. India is less than half the size of the USA. So I made them all try to squish into one side of the box. It was pretty funny to watch people fall out into the ocean.

Once they had an idea of how crowded India is, I had eleven of them line up across the front of the room. I separated eight of them from the other three and explained that they represent the percent of the population that is Hindu, and we talked a little bit about what they believe.

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Then I took the next two girls and had one of them squat down so they represented about 13 percent of the population that is Muslim. (Which, by the way, seemed much larger than that in Hyderabad, because it has a really high Muslim population.)

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The last girl I told them was confused, because she represented basically everything that was left, including Buddhists, Sikhs and some other native religions. Then I asked her to take off her shoe. Her shoe represented the percent of the population in India that is Christian, which is around 2.3%. It was a really eye-opening way to see how much work remains to be done in India, and I hope that it's something they will remember.

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After that portion of the morning, the girls went to recreation, which ended up being indoors due to some torrential rain we got that morning. Amazing, since we haven't had any rain in about a month!

Bailey had so much fun during the Olympic games. They did all kinds of relay races, and a decathalon of sorts where each group had to get through ten different events. It not only wore them out, it also worked up some huge appetites!

Of course Bailey's favorite times were meal times. She thought she was so big, getting to fill her own lunch tray. I just couldn't resist snapping a quick pic.
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After lunch the girls had craft time, where they put together some baby blankets to be sent to the Philippines. Then it was time for the Missions Fair. Each of us "missionaries" had a booth to display our stuff, and then there were lots of game and craft type booths.

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It completely cracked me up to have so many of the girls come up and ask for my autograph. They were so sweet.

Although that looks like Bailey has a dot on her forehead, it's actually a ladybug from the face painting booth. She was so proud of my missionary status. It warmed my heart to see her want to show me off. I know that won't happen too many times in our future.

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I love that we had the time to spend together, even if she did keep me up all night. We had some really fun talks, and I hope it was something she'll remember. I know I will.