Our second Super Saturday in Riga was extra special since Elder & Sister Davis got to teach a scripture-marking class. This was the first "real" class we taught in Latvia and we had a captive audience since they had to sit through our class before they got lunch....It started at 11:00 and by 10:30, LDS youth from all over Latvia started arriving by bus and van. We had 17 come from Liepaja and 2 from Daugavpils and about 22 from Riga.
Now it was our turn but first we needed to wake up the crowd. The youth had been sitting for about 40 minutes and Sister Davis had an idea to get them off their tush's and get their blood pumping before we started our activity. For those who have been to "Girls Camp" you will recognize the Campfire song that Sister Davis used...A Tee-da-Tah. Only when she looked it up online, it is actually called the Tooty-Ta song. It was pretty hilarious watching all the Latvians and Russians with their tongues out singing A-Tee-da-Tah. Once the audience was warmed up, it was time to do some seriously fun scripture marking!
You see Elder & Sister Davis learned a great way to find scriptures quickly. And it was because we were so lousy in the Missionary Training Center at finding the scripture we needed without fumbling through a hundred pages. We realized we know key verses in the Bible and Book of Mormon but we don't know WHERE to find them. It was an "Ah-Hah!" moment. We needed a plan to find scriptures on certain topics quickly. So most mornings, Elder & Sister Davis have been putting colored tabs in their scriptures by topic.
If we want to find key scriptures on resurrection, we now have them within seconds. And we wanted to share this knowledge with the youth here. Within a very short time, the youth were busily engaged gluing the topic list in the front of their scriptures and putting colored tabs on each one. Then they found verses in the Bible that emphasized the topic and put a colored tab that coordinated with the topic on the side of the page where the verse was found.
And we know it was successful because we had kids come up to us during Sunday School the next day showing us how much they had accomplished. Anytime you can get the young people happily reading and studying scriptures you know you've done a good job as a missionary!
A sweet and humble District President busily engaged marking his scriptures as well! When it was lunch time, we sent the participants out to play a game so we could get the tables set and the food served.
The youth played a getting-to-know-you game even though most everyone knew each other already. The first game was the "Name Game". The kids were divided into two groups and told to sit on the floor. Two people hold up a blanket between the two groups. One person from each team stand facing each other with a large blanket inbetween. The blanket drops, and the first person to correctly identify the other person wins the round.
Look at the faces of the kids....they are very intense. These kids play to win. There is no boredom and everyone wants to participate.
The next game wasn't really a game at all. It was work disguised as a game and it was the brain-child of our very own genius Maksims. He was given a tin of old church building keys that have been piling up for years and no one was quite sure what they opened. Maks brings the tin in and has each of the kids pick one key and tells them to go around the church and find out what (if anything) they opened. The kids had a ball running around the church trying to match locks to keys!
Below: A tin full of keys...
Rudolfs taking his "lock" finding very seriously ...
And the game ended with 8 keys that fit in locks. The rest were tossed out!
The next game was quite amusing. It is called Evolution (a rather funny game to play in a church). Look closely at the following diagrams...
In this game everyone starts out as an egg. And you play Paper, Rock, Scissors (PRS) to see who gets to evolve into something else and who stays an egg. Each time you evolve you have to act the part of the new animal so you can find the others that are like you.
It is a very strange theory of evolution...from egg to chick, to hen, to bear, to dinosaur and if you make it to "gurki" (Latvian for pickle) you win. Must be Seinfeld's theory of evolution and not Darwins! Paper, rock, scissors...
Aleksandrs wins that round!....... Elder Davis visiting with a non-member friend from Liepaja..
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Have you ever had so much fun in your life?
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