Fusion International began in Australia in 1996 and is all about community festivals: moving people from isolation into relationship.  Our group led festivals in North Vancouver, Burnaby, and on Commercial Drive where we did face painting, circus skills, balloon sculpting, crafts, served free hot dogs and led center games, which had the effect of turning groups of strangers into a circle of friends who were laughing as they
participated in the Hokey Pokey and the Macarena!  Kevin Hegeman in grade 11 figured one of the best applications of seeing how effective festivals were was watching a little boy coming into festival crying because his mom was making him come, and then watching him stay the entire time and start screaming and crying again because he didn’t want to go home!  One of our face painters, Larissa Teschke from grade 10, said festivals taught her about the “different stages of relationship” as we saw people come back each day, and become a bit more open each time to telling us their stories and hearing about why we were doing what we were doing.  We learned about communication in training, and it was cool to see this played out in front of us.  As Matt Bulman put it, “I really saw how the people I met didn’t need me to talk, they just wanted me to listen, and I learned that communication really is more about listening than speaking” (Matt Bulman a.k.a. Topsy the Clown, gr. 11).  As we would debrief together in the evenings, we talked many times about how well that famous St.  Francis of Assisi quote applied to our trip: “share the gospel at all times; if necessary, use words”.

For the last part of our outreach, we worked with the Salvation Army serving some of the over 600,000 cups of coffee and hot chocolate that were given out to Olympic visitors.  The highlight for grade 12 student Rachelle Steegstra was wearing the “cool Rocketman back packs filled with hot chocolate”, being part of the electric atmosphere of downtown Vancouver, and being so well received by the recipients of the hot chocolate – one of our team members even received a kiss as thanks!   This experience really made it clear that you can “share about who God is by just serving other people” (Kantara Nemetz, grade 12).  As with other outreach experiences, it was so great to see this team of people, some who didn’t even know each other’s names at our first meeting, become a closely knit bunch, who were not quite sure how they would survive living apart at the end of the outreach.   Overall, we learned that “we need to get more involved in our own communities because people really do want to build relationships” (Yenuel Westeringh, grade 12), and that making a difference in our world is simpler than we might think.

written by Julie Lade