Working the Konakt Festival – Bruins on Mission

Today was our first day working Konakt Festival with Proem Ministries. We started off the morning with breakfast at the hotel restaurant and then headed out to the patio for a couple devotions within our group. After our group devotions, we headed down to the conference room where we had a devotional with the rest of people working Kontakt Festival. We were then assigned to two different work sites for the day.

My group and I hopped in a van and headed to an elementary school in Łódź, about an hour away from our hotel in Piotrków. With all the road work going on and the landscape surrounding the highways, one would think we were in Nashville.

Once we arrived at the school, we quickly learned the teachers knew very little English in the gym class we were teaching, so we were given a translator named Janek. Janek would interpret the rules of the games for the kids while we demonstrated them. At times, the language barrier was very hard because most of them knew no English and we knew very little Polish. However, despite the language barrier we were able to bring a smile to those children’s faces and there is no greater feeling than bringing joy to someone’s day.

We played basketball games, relay games, hula hooped and ran through an obstacle course. Derek and Mitch, aka “tall boys,” even played a game of one-on-one to keep the children laughing and engaged. Besides teaching gym class, we were able to sit in on two English classes and tell the students a little about ourselves, college and American culture. Most of the students only understood a few words of English but a few were fluent due to taking extra English courses outside of school. Many of the students were amazed with our studies/majors and were intrigued by the idea of one university having many different sports and clubs.

After classes were done for the day, we hopped in the van and headed back to our hotel. We had polish steak and FRENCH FRIES for dinner! After dinner, a few of the girls from our group and I went down the street to McDonald’s and tried Poland’s take on a McFlurry and it was way better than an American McFlurry.

Our group then headed to celebrate a neat new space Proem is opening that will be lead by a couple who recently moved here from America. Afterwards, we headed back to the hotel to take a nice, warm shower. Later, we all met up again to do a couple more devotions and share some words of encouragement with one another. Oh, and I almost forgot we played the essential nightly game of spicy Uno.

The other group had an impactful day as well, setting up the new Proem space for the party, inviting locals to the party by handing out flyers in the streets, and playing games with kids at a local after school program. Because of the group inviting the kids and their families to the party, two families came were introduced to the Proem church!