Watonga Vacation Bible School

This is the third year I have been involved in the Vacation Bible School our church offers to the mission church in Watonga, OK. Watonga is a little over an hour west of Oklahoma City. The town's economy is primarily supported by farming and a near-by prison.

The main crop is wheat. Since there has been little rain since late 2005, there is not much wheat crop to harvest. So, Watonga is even more depressed right now than normal.

There are now three churches that offer three different Vacation Bible Schools in Watonga: ours, one from Norman, and one from Duncan. We go because Watonga is the historic home of St. David Pendleton Oakerhater, a Cheyenne warrior who became a deacon in the Episcopal Church.

He founded an Indian Mission and Boarding school a few miles south of Watonga. Sometime in the early 1900s, he was forced to close that mission, and opened a new one closer to Watonga.

As I see it, our Vacation Bible School is one way we continue St. Oakerhater's ministry to the people in this area, especially the Native Americans.

There are not many places for our "missioners" to stay in Watonga: a couple of bed & breakfasts, two or three motels, and a lodge about 6 miles north of town. The current deacon for the mission, Rev. Jim, always selects the least expensive motel in town. This is in consideration of the fact that our church covers the cost of the motel for the missioners.

The motel we stayed in last year was especially bad: bugs, suspicious plastic covering on the bed, generally unhealthy atmosphere in the rooms. One day, we chose to put quarters in the drier in order to have clean towels. That motel burned sometime in the past few months. I walked by the motel, and my immediate suspicion was "insurance fire".

The place we stayed this year was much better, by comparison. The primary down-side was initial haggling about the number of rooms we had reserved, and the loss of hot water on Thursday and Friday. Regarding that latter point, it turned out that a water line had broken.

Ten adults (some for only a day), and five young people from our church were volunteered. About thirty youth from the town attended, from toddler to teen-age; the town's teen-agers also helped looked after the youngest children.

It rained Wednesday night, and some Thursday morning, and our voluteers chose to keep the kids inside. That meant a lot of pent-up energy in a relatively small space. The noise level was rather maddening.

I was worried we'd have the same situation on Friday, when it rained even more. Normally, we take the VBS kids swimming on Friday; it's something we promise them every day. It's an out-door pool, which means it's not safe during a thunderstorm. So, once again, we had to keep the kids inside and reluctantly disappoint them with the loss of the promised swimming. But they were better behaved on Friday. Pam, the official storyteller for the VBS, suspected barometric pressure was a factor in the kids' wildness on Thursday.

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