Team 2 jams with their host fams!

Howdy ya'll! It's once again time for another peek into the life of Team 2. It has been a great week; we cannot believe that we have less than a month of ministry left!

Last Tuesday we had a very small Encounter Day; we had only about 18 grade 8 students. Personally, I love small retreats because we get to know almost all the students. They were such a good group; we were all amazed at how loving they were to each other and to their teacher. Most of them had gone to school with each other for a long time so they were very close. They were open to everything we had to say and participated fully in the day.

On Wednesday we traveled to Stratford, home of our lovely Katie Doyle. The next day we did the Confirmation Encounter Day for Katie's parish. The prayer time was awesome because we had confession available and there was a long line of students that wanted to go. Since the students are required to go before Confirmation, we really encouraged them to receive the sacrament. Even though some of the students were nervous and unsure, a lot of them still went which was amazing to experience.

After the retreat, we traveled to Essex, ON, which is the home parish of staff member Caitlyn Bondy and NET alumni Heather Verbeek. It was great to see Heather and catch up and some of us also got to stay with her and her family. We also had the privilege of meeting another NET alumni, Martin Skipper, and got to spend some time with him. The Bondy family had the whole team over for a barbecue; we had a nice time getting to know them.

On Friday we traveled to Alliston, ON where we stayed with some really amazing host families! Once again, I was struck by the generosity of the people we meet. The girls stayed with two families who each had several young children. Even though they had very busy schedules, they welcomed us in and were so happy to have us there. They were a beautiful witness to the Faith and to family. One of the families had all of us over one evening for a jam session. We had four guitars going and played everything from oldies to worship music. It was great to share our love of music with the families and to bond as a team.

We had a team day on Sunday and celebrated Paul's unbirthday. We went to a video arcade and had some fun trying our best to win as many games as we could. At the end we combined all of our tickets, which totaled to about 2000, and bought some prizes. Happy Unbirthday Paul!

Well that's a little bit of Team 2 news, hope you enjoyed!

God Bless,

Claire