oil spill and church retreat

Now thats an original title.

This last weekend was our church retreat, as you may have guessed from the title. The church decided to go to Taean and help clean up oil that spilled about a month ago. If any of you have seen that Simpsons episode were Lisa is very excited to go and help save the world and clean up an oil spill, only to arrive and find she has to scrub rocks with a toothbrush, well thats what it was. Rather unromantic. We dug holes in the sand, when the sand was black we either took old clothes and tried to rub the oil out or we tried to dig out the black sand and throw it in bags. If we found a rock with oil on it, we wiped off the oil. But it was still fun. It was actually a lot cleaner than i was expecting. Little oil in the water, but there was black on some of the surrounding cliffs and there was a layer of black sand about 5-10 inches down from the surface. And it did smell.

Anyway, here are some pictures. This is Kwang-kyu. He is our friend and has started coming to Grace and peace. He was in my Peacebuilders class and has taken a number of other classes from Connexus. He is nice.



This the cleaning. There was another volunteer group there helping clean. I think most of the clean up has been done by groups volunteering to wipe up the oil with old clothes.


Vanessa made a new friend who said if Canada has an oil spill, she is going to come and help clean it up.


Most, but not all of our group.

This was inside the room where we had our church retreat. Those are our church members. They are also nice. My legs were a bit sore from doing everything on the floor, but, when in rome.

That is all,