Taize

We spent a "Family Week" in Taize. It was fantastic! The families stay about a kilometer away in the next town over, Olinda. There were maybe a thousand young people from around the world staying right in Taize. I was glad to be away from the intensity of that, but it was too long a walk for our boys' short legs.
Families were invited to go to Taize for worship three times each day, as well as relax at the snackbar across the street. Although the worship was too long a walk for the boys, there were many days they were strong enough to walk to get an ice cream.

Below, you can see that the rooms in Olinda were quite simple. Reminiscent of a 1960 dorm room with shared showers and toilets on each floor, our accommodations were still vastly superior to the tent housing in Taize proper.


On our first evening there, the children learned about their daily Children's Program and the parents self-selected into small groups. Our group was two couples from the US, a couple from South Africa, a dad from Spain, and a young couple from the UK who only stayed for a few days.
Each morning everyone gathered after breakfast for program time. The program this year is based on the story of the prodigal son, or as they called it, "The Story of the Two Lost Sons." We met together for a few minutes, then the children went off to an active children's program while a delightful Dutch monk from Taize spent about an hour delving in to this story and how it relates to our own lives and what it says about God. He gave us a few questions to ponder and then we broke into in our small groups to discuss the topics of the day.
(Ask us about how they navigated the 17 languages of the families attending that week. It's fascinating.)

Each small group had a weekly job. Our job was preparing, serving, and cleaning up snack time. The food at Taize was not very good and not very much. But it was adequate. (Very un-American...) Everyone, youngest to oldest, was expected to serve the community by helping out in some way. The children loved passing out the bowls and utensils, and we all enjoyed the quick dishwashing.




The program continued in the late afternoon, and at this time parents and children attended together. Each afternoon, the program begin with a wonderful drama that was an updated, expanded version of the parable.
All the children LOVED the afternoon program. They would run to make sure they got good seats, and were incredibly attentive. The drama was awfully good.
After the presentation, each adult small group and the children in their families would get together and have discussion and activities related to the day's drama.