Bingo

I am the Varsity Coach for the Boy Scouts here at our church. Each month, or every so often, we look for service opportunities locally to volunteer at. Sometimes the ideas are better than others. Tonight the boys decided that they wanted to visit the nice old people at the assisted living facility close to church.

We asked if we could come and play bingo with them and that seemed like an innocent enough request. But as luck would have it, we could have picked a better activity. And I guess the activity went well overall, but there were some "moments".

The first "moment" happened as one of us (scouters) happened to win bingo. We began playing about twenty minutes into the tournament. Excitedly a young scout screamed out that he had "bingo". I guess either the old lady was mad that we had won on our first round, or that we didn't actually live at the facility. Either way, she was very adimant that we not be recognized as players. (which was a mini-sized snickers bar) She mustered up quite a bit of strength to stand up and claim that he should not be awarded the bingo prize. The boy was a bit embarassed and declined the highly coveted chocolate morsel.

I am not sure how the other "moments" happened, they just did. I guess one nice old couple got pretty fired up and shouted, "We can't play this game with you talking to us." I was on the other side of the room, but the sweet couple decided to use their outside voice to communicate to one of the scouts.

We had a great time and I would love to go again. Most of the people were very sweet and happy to talk to us while the game was going on. Some people stopped playing altogether to talk to the scouts. It was a very rewarding experience for all of us. Many of the boys doubted and even openly expressed their disapoval of the selected activity. However, they couldn't stop talking about the funny things that happened in a mere 45 minutes of gaming with the elderly. Another thing that I love is how they get away with casual swearing...for some reason it is hilarious to me. Maybe as I get older and balder Michelle will allow me a couple casual swear words to mix things up :)