Summer Camp Argentina Style!

Wow, it has been a busy last couple of weeks! We took about 15 of our youth to church camp in Argentina for a week, and a wonderful week it was! There were 45 teenagers from three churches in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and about 10 from another city in Argentina. There was about 70 campers total, along with many staff members and helpers. This is a picture of our group before we left for camp.

This is me and my dear friend Gina with our excited about camp faces! She is basically the Paraguayan version of me (except with a fanny pack).

Camp in Argentina reminded me a lot of Blue Haven because it was in the mountains, and it was so beautiful. Also, we went on an all day hike one day to a waterfall, and we played games and did typical camp type activities in the evenings. We also sang a lot, had a camp fire one night, and we even played an Argentine version of capture the flag (except there was flour involved and it was kind of messy…but it’s a great game…maybe we can play it CTW…Tammy you would love it). Our speaker all week was a man named Carlos from Columbia, and his lessons were incredible. The theme of the week was “Submerge me”, and we talked about being submerged in God’s word, His love, His forgiveness, and much more. This is everyone listening to a lesson.

And this is a picture from our hike:

Here’s Brittnea and I with one of our favorite campers, Pato.

We also led small groups for the campers, and these were a real blessing. We had a lot of good conversation, discussion, and study. And on the last night of camp 6 people (all from Argentina) were baptized. The neatest thing about the teenagers at this camp was that they weren’t your typical church camp campers…most all of them that came from Argentina had no church background and had tattoos, piercings, spike collars, etc. It kind of reminded me a little of 6th session at CBH, but perhaps the greatest lesson I learned was that God works in such powerful ways that He can reach those that we have labeled “unreachable”. At the beginning of the week, I was thinking oh my…look at that kid’s spike collar or that girl has a lot of tattoos, and then by the end I came to realize that those were the kids that needed to be there the most and praise God that he made a way for them to get there! 6 people are new creations now, and so many more are going back to their homes different than when they got there. It was an amazing week!