In April we did our "Speed Friendshipping" activity. This ties into self reliance and emergency preparedness because of communication and building relationships. It's important to know who to call. Whether it's trouble after a storm, just needing someone to talk to, or an emergency babysitting situation, getting to know the variety of people we have in Relief Society helps everyone to appreciate each other's uniqueness and individual talents. Additionally, we also have the visiting teaching program in the church. Visiting teaching is a beautiful system that's built already built in that allows for everyone to have someone to call. It's like a built in emergency phone call tree. It's an amazing network of friendship and love that has worked WONDERS in lives.
Again, I was terrible at documenting this but mainly because it was SO DANG FUN!!
People are still talking about it and thanking us for such a fun night.
We started off doing a Cafe Rio dinner with sweet pork burritos. I have to say...those were a big hit! It was nice to be able to do it "buffet style" so that people were able to build a burrito or make it into a salad. We picked up a few of the Cafe Rio style aluminum tins to give it a more authentic feel and make for easy clean up. They were 3 for 88 cents at Walmart. We heated tortillas on a griddle and let people add black beans, rice, sweet shredded pork, Pica de Gallo, sour cream, lettuce, Monterey jack cheese, crumbled tortilla chips & the Cafe Rio lime cilantro tomatillo ranch dressing.
Trust me-the dressing MAKES the meal!!
So anyway- we had our dinner... and it was so yummy that this is all I have to show for it:
A half cleaned up mess with almost everything totally gone.
While people were arriving/finishing dinner there were little "get to know you" activities around in order to eliminate any awkward down time and transition.
Our activities:
On the table we had M&M's to snack on. But not without a catch!
To snack on the M&M's you had to answer a question about yourself. Each color of the candy represented a different question or story to tell about yourself.
My favorite game... Who's Who?
Prior to the activity, I asked the ladies to send me pictures of themselves a kid or a baby. I then assembled the pictures and numbered them. The sisters were able to write down their guesses to who each of the babies were. It was a blast! Some of them were easier than others..we definitely were stumped on a few!
Friendship Bingo
Here we put different things like "plays soccer" and "is afraid of spiders" in each box and did it like a scavenger hunt. The ladies were buzzing around the room trying to find friends that met these criteria! It was also so funny to realize that only ONE person was born in September out of everyone we had there. To try and watch everyone try to find that one person...priceless.
Prizes?
Well, we were kind of lame and were so caught up in all of the activities that we never did have certain winners for the games. Our intention was to give away our centerpieces-the pineapples- as prizes. Who doesn't like pineapple? The tag say "Did you know pineapples are the symbol of friendship and hospitality?" You can look into why that is on your own if you're interested. But either way, for a "friendshipping" activity, I felt like that was a pretty solid gift!
The main event...
For the actual "speed friendshipping" game we switched things up a bit.
We ended up having way more people than I ever anticipated. Our little ward normally has probably 12-15 people come to our activities each month so I rounded up a bit for this one. We ended up having over 40 sisters come! A WONDERFUL problem to have.
Anyway--that left my plan to be altered a bit day of. Thankfully I'd planned to have a ton of left overs and almost all of the food was used. For seating however, I had to put up several extra tables leaving our 3 long tables for the "speed frienshipping" without any centerpiece or decor.
So the night before, instead of printing out a list of questions for people to reference and choose from, I decided it'd be more fun to cut a ton of questions into strips, curl them up, and dump them all down the center of the tables!
I actually loved the way this turned out even more than I anticipated. While we did kind of need to mix the questions up every once and a while, the ladies were great about just spreading them all around. It was so easy for them to just reach into the center and start reading!
So here's how this worked:
-3 long tables pushed together with chairs on both sides (make sure the chairs line up directly across from each other)
-One person to time
-Questions for people to ask each other
We had the ladies sit on both sides of the table. The person across from you is your partner for the round. One side begins asking questions to their partner and when the bell rings, the one who was just answering then begins to ask the questions to the same partner. After that and both sides have had their turn to ask questions, ONE side of the table slides down one seat. This lets people rotate most efficiently and also allows for the older sisters to remain stationary for a while. Because there were way more people than anticipated we did a VERY short amount of time per person. I'm talking 30 seconds each to ask the partner questions. My first plan was to do longer time periods and people just wouldn't make it all the way through the line, but our ward was more in favor of short period of time and meeting as many people as possible.
And you know what? 30 seconds ended up being just fine. People would grab from the questions, or good friends just visited, or people made up their own questions. Some people were so involved they even took notes on the answers people were giving!
Since I got to be timer, I got to overhear some of the conversations. Hilarious!
And you know what? There were some ladies who had never officially met. We had people introducing themselves, spelling their names, and starting new friendships.
It really was just a beautiful thing.
If you decide to do this for an activity though...I'd recommend bringing some kind of bell. I was confident I'd be able to just call out "time" when it was time to switch. Nope...not so lucky. I ended up going into the kitchen to get a metal bowl and spoon to bang on at time. Hey...whatever works, right!?
I sure love these ladies and have loved the opportunity to get to know all of them a little bit better. It has been one of the GREATEST blessings right now to be able to work with, serve, get to know every one of them. The frienships have blessed my life more than I could even express.
I'm including this picture because it has one of the quotes that I used in my "mini-lesson" about why we were doing the activity. It's from a talk by Sister Oscarson. Isn't it so true? We need each other so much. And yet, we let ourselves or silly things get in the way of developing these deep relationships with one another. We bless ourselves and each other when we break down these barriers and let what is naturally good bless our lives.
*If anyone wants to use any flyers, documents, questions, recipes, etc just let me know! I'd be happy to send you whatever you need.
Tomorrow we have our next Relief Society activity. It will be another Tuesday night/Wednesday morning activity. I'm going to do my best to get pictures... so stay posted!
And can I just say... I'm getting so excited for our activity in June?!
We're obviously still fine tuning some things with this activity, but it's going to be so much fun.
If you're in the Medford Ward... hope to see you there!!
