It is the best week of the year according to the teenagers... A 5 day camp in the middle of nowhere, on the countryside of São Paulo, in the middle of the forest... A unique chance for most of the teenagers, because the majority of them never gets to go out of the slum where they live and have never left the concrete jungle of this huge city. Five full days in nature, away from the poverty and problems of every day; five days of friendship, laughter, (night)games and teachings about the Bible and the life of hope God wants to give us. Every year in July, during the winter holidays, we organize a teen camp and take 25 teenagers with us into the woods to spend some wonderful days together. And we know and have experienced that exactly these 5 days can be life changing for these kids...
And so we had a wonderful teen camp last July! God provided in wonderful ways everything we needed to run the camp: in the very last week before camp we managed to find a cook, enough money came in for food, materials and the bus, and surprisingly the weather was awesome (after two years of rainy, cold camps)! So we really felt a bit spoiled with all these blessings! Thank you all so much for your support and prayers!
We got to spend 5 long days with 24 noisy teenagers. It was a wonderful, busy time, sometimes quite challenging to maintain order. Every year we turn the camp into a competition between several groups; during the games they can earn points and also lose points because of breaking the rules or fighting. We always divide the groups in a way that teenagers who normally don´t really spend time together, are put in the same group and will have to work together. Every now and then this leads to arguing and fighting, but this year we saw once again that it is a good way to teach the teenagers to work together, care for the weakest, make new friendships and get over prejudice.
In one of the groups were four girls who don´t really get along well and so during camp things went completely wrong between them. On the morning of day 2 two of them were crying and the other two were ready to attack each other... But it was wonderful to see how this changed after a good talk about understanding and forgiving each other. By the end of camp they walked around as friends and it was their group who won the competition!
As far as the biblical content goes, we had a good camp too. We studied and lived through the whole journey through the desert. We talked mainly about trusting God, unity, contentment (in stead of complaining about everything) and stubbornness (and how this can complicate life). There were some scary moments during the night games in the dark forest, funny moments when the kids just threw themselves into the river because Faraoh was coming to get them, and some long, tiring walks through the woods (because the journey through the desert wasn´t that easy). I myself had a lot of fun when I managed to seduce the kids into building a golden calf out of clay (complete with gold spray and gold glitter), after which they suddenly realized that they of course weren´t allowed to build this calf and became afraid of uncle Robert´s (Moses) reaction upon seeing what they had done; Robert played his part well and got really angry when he saw the golden calf: he threw the ten commandments on the floor and destroyed our entire art work! The excuse the kids gave: it´s all Dorothee´s fault, she seduced us into building this calf!!
So it was a wonderful time, with a great group of kids who really enjoyed nature, the free time in the swimming pool, the good food and all the different games & activities. We are very thankful to God for the time He has given us together. Each one of these teenagers is so precious and it is so worth it to invest in their young lives! We pray that they will have learned some important lessons during camp and that they will make wise choices and live their lives with God.
God bless you!
Caio & Dorothee
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