Making a Difference

The 30 Hour Famine went off without a hitch this year! a total of 140 teens showed up and there were about 20 leaders, so the church was pretty full all weekend!
The goal this year was to save the lives of 70 children. Saving the life of 1 child = $360. I'm not sure how they calculate that number....maybe it feeds them for one year? I'll have to ask someone about that. But anyway, so far the teens have raised enough money to save 56 children! That's $20,160! And donations will keep coming in for about a week or two after the famine. So they are very close to making their goal. I'm so happy for the teens and for all the children they will be saving! They really are making a difference.

I ended up staying at the church almost the whole time during the famine. It was so fun and exciting to be there, I decided I'd just stay and try to capture every moment on my camera, and help wherever else I was needed. It was such a great time! Here are some highlights in pictures:

I was in charge of the juice breaks this weekend. Here are a small fraction of the amount of juice cups we needed for each break. I think I used on average 8 or 9 full bottles of juice for each juice break. We had a huge walk-in cooler almost completely full of the juice, and on Saturday we ended up having to run out and get about 15 more bottles because we ran out! 100% fruit juice and water were the only things the kids were allowed to drink (they couldn't eat ANYTHING) so when they got a chance, they drank a lot of it!
My best friend, Rachel, and I had a great time with the kids this weekend. My eyes were closed here, and she looks like she was smoking something, but that's okay! lol...it just shows you that we were so exhausted we were becoming goofy :-P
Luke and his best friend JC also get a little goofy when they are together!:
The kids had fun activities all weekend. The first one? A shoe-tower-building contest.
Unfortunately my Mom has my memory card so she can put the pictures on the church website (she's the church administrative assistant, and is in charge of the websiste) so I don't have my pictures of all the fun stuff the kids did on Saturday! Oh well.

LOTS of kids were there...I got a picture of all of them at one point. But again, my mom has it. I'll post it later! Here is a picture of some of the kids in the gym during a juice break. I escaped the kitchen for a moment to get some pictures!

The best part of Friday night? A one80 band concert! They led worship all weekend, but Friday they had a special concert where they played fun songs for the kids. My favorite one that they played was "Wake me up Inside" by Evanescence. It sounded exactly like the actual song!

This happened...until we told the kids it wasn't okay. We didn't want any injuries!
Here's my husband, doing what he does best!

There's my friend, Laura, sounding exactly like Amy Lee from Evanescence. She has an AMAZING voice. She and here brother sang at my wedding :-)They played Rawkfist:
I think the kids had fun! There's my sister-in-law on the left:

Okay, I suppose that's enough for now :-) Luke and I have decided to spend some of our splurge money on lunch today. We're absolutely exhausted!! Does that mean we're getting old? We never used to feel this wiped out after helping with the famine! We're going out to lunch, and then sleeping all afternoon until FPU tonight.

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!