This past Friday, Bethany’s hallowed halls were desolate due to the high school students being gone at various bonding and learning sites together.
Every year for day away the freshmen go to Camp Mack from Thursday overnight to Friday. Most of their activities they did were outside including swimming in Lake Waubee, doing team-building activities, going rock climbing, zip lining, and enjoying s’mores outside. Later that day they had a devotional from junior and senior English teacher, Michael Yeakey. Cameron Heinisch says a good way of describing him is “not scary unless provoked.”
The sophomores started off their morning by going over to the Goshen College campus to do a photo scavenger hunt. Many had a lot of fun walking around finding different clues although, the main event was after in which they went to Hope Hochstedler’s house and swam and played games outside. “We had a really lame basketball game that was really fun,” says Evelyn Lapadat.
The juniors on day away rode a bus down to Shanklin, loaded up their canoes and paddled 6 miles for 3 hours downstream with their eyes set on Ox Bow park. Several groups had to exit their canoe mid stream to free it from a sandbank or intrusive rocks. They had a good time getting to know their canoe groups better and once arrived they had a grill out and played various games like ultimate frisbee, volleyball, and spikeball. (a variation of volleyball)
Before heading to Mariah Miller’s grandparents house to swim, the seniors talked with Jim Buller about senior trip, college preparation, and future plans. Later that day, Dale gave a mini-sermon about what it means to be seniors and what that means to each student. “Family” was the word that Xudong Sun came up with to represent the hope for the class relationship this year.
With team-building, getting to know each other better, and having fun, this event was a great way to start off the year.