Children's Camp

“This generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth!”

- Keith Green

Explaining a game to the children

Monday morning, 7 August, we started our first children’s camp for kids seven to eleven years old. It ran for most of the day, from 10:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. Unlike the English camp, which my team planned and conducted, the children’s camp was put on by CVJM members, and the Pioneers team was simply helping with activities. The day started out rather rough. One of the one of the adults was in a bad mood, and I also found out that I could not chaperon the canoe trip, as our team had planned for me to do, simply because of church politics. (It's rather sad to have church politics without even being a church.)

Magnetic soccer

Except for the day’s introduction gathering, closing gathering, and a few camp-wide activities, the children were free to roam from several stations, mainly soccer/recreation, crafts, origami, ping-pong, and rock climbing. Instead of canoeing, I was assigned to run the ping-pong station.  I was given two ping-pong tables without nets, so I used my engineering abilities and made some makeshift nets from discarded Styrofoam insulation and duct tape. In order to allow more children to play, I even fashioned an extra one-against-one table from an unused folding table in the area. It wound up that the children were too young to have any extended interest in ping-pong, so I also showed them where the foosball and magnetic soccer tables were. Based on a suggestion from Klaus, I even set up a game on Tuesday that involved throwing a small, weighted bottle at seven larger, weighted bottles with assorted point values; it was like a combination of bowling and horseshoes.

Foosball, the most lively and most enjoyed of my games

Despite my initial job responsibilities, my job evolved more into making sure that all the children had partners for the games and that none felt left-out. Several people mentioned to me how much they appreciated me doing this, and in the end, I think it was much more important for me to be interacting with the children at the CVJM than being with just a few children in a canoe. In total, we had around fifty children attend the camp, and most of these come from non-Christian or nominal-Christian households. I was very glad to get to know some of them. Each of whom had his or her own unique personality, likes and dislikes, favorite activities, and backgrounds. I am honored to think that perhaps God was using me to make an eternal difference in these children’s lives.

The group game on Wednesday was rather fun. The objective was for the children to individually search for small pictures of a beaver hidden around the CVJM. When a child found a beaver, he or she had to bring the beaver to a special table to get credit for the child’s team. The children could only have one beaver at a time in their hands, and “sheriffs” wearing cowboy hats would watch to make sure the children followed this rule. My job was to hide the beavers before and during the game. I made sure to hide some in obvious places, some in small nooks and crannies, and some far out of the children’s reach. To my surprise, the children managed to find even the best hidden and reach the most unobtainable. I personally enjoyed hiding beavers under the sheriffs’ hats and later watching the sheriffs attacked by a swam of grabby children. I continued to hide beavers as the children were searching. It took them a long time to figure out what I was doing, even though I was also simply dropping many of the beavers on the ground. When some did figure it out, I stopped hiding beavers and hid in the bathroom, where I tossed some out of the window until I could safely leave.

Skit for morning gathering with Dr. Tutmirweh

Many CVJM members were giving of their time and talents in assisting with the camp. I was rather upset that the only time we discussed Jesus was during the introduction and closing gatherings. Even though the children’s camp resembled a condensed VBS, the activities during gatherings were not related to anything the children were taught during the gatherings, nor did the activities reinforce concepts the children learned. I suggested this possibility to one of the workers, to whom this was a new and unusual idea. The gatherings in themselves were very well done; we sang German Christian children’s songs, learned about Biblical characters, and heard about the Good News. On Tuesday morning, I played a patient who had a stomach ache for Dr. "Tutmirweh" ("it hurts") . The doctor refused to see me, but he did give me candy as the solution to my stomach ache!

Explaining salvation with the bridge diagram

Overall, the children’s camp went very well. I was very glad to help make even a very small part in the children’s lives and possibly in their eternal destinations. This generation of children is growing up in a very secular and God-less society. They are brought up to question the existence of God and any afterlife. It is good that the American Church sends out so many missionaries all over the world, but we must wake up to the fact that western and central Europe is a spiritual wilderness. Numerically, the number of Christ-followers in Europe over the last hundred years has steadily declined, while the count of believers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has exploded exponentially. For more information, read my post “Why Europe?”