English Camp a great sucess - Thank goodness for Back Ups?!

Our 2008 Light Camp Staff as follows:
Miss June, Gail, Miss Kaew, Mike Bosley (our guest speaker) , JoyLynn, Michelle, Me (Don Craft), Miss Kanya, and Tangmo.

We finished our English Camp entitled, "Light Camp" on Tuesday, but for our center, the blessing will be an on going boost to our overall ministry. One special event was the first real service opportunity for Miss Kanya, a lady from our Santisuk church who was baptized last year, who now has a great desire to serve the Lord here. (second from right).

Certainly we had a number of set backs as we started. For example:

On the Friday morning before the camp, a hard drive which had much of the Power points and lessons to be used in the camp, died! It simply refused to turn on! That failure took some recent data. Fortunately I had back ups of other materials done recently on another hard disk so we were able to recover and go ahead with no other difficulties and other things went well.

We plan ahead but we can never anticipate what may happen as the school term ends and some schools in the area extended classes a few days to make up for lost class days to meet annual minimum teaching days requirements.

One village where we had a number of new prospective students had a village merit making on the first day of our camp. Most of these children went with their families to the merit ceremonies.

Our septic system for the youth center was taxed to the limit by constant rains and lots of girls some of whom spent the nights for our camp (we always have more girls than boys for classes) and our youth center sewer backed up late one evening. We were forced to re-opened a bathroom we had "retired" off my office which was being used for storage and that helped us get through the camp. I was unsure how long it would take to find a "honey wagon" to clean out the full sewer.

But there was an amazing resolution to the problem early the next day while picking up some children for youth camp, we were almost home when I spotted a "honey wagon" traveling into our city. They were being stopped at a police check, so we flagged them down and told them to follow us to the center. They saw the van load of local kids and only charged us about 8 dollars for the clean out and everything was back to normal again with no interruption to our camp! How wonderful it is when the Lord provides for our needs in big and little things. Now we know we need to extend our sewer some with a first hand test -- so I visited with our builder and we now have a plan for doubling our capacity.

In spite of these things we had a full house each day. It was almost like we had a different group each day for Camp.

On the positive side, one of our college aged Christians asked us if her mother could come and help with housekeeping for family income. That mom saw our center and invited three children the first days, seven the second day and twenty four the final day of camp from her village. Our van was packed.

On the final evening of our camp, a young lady who was a friend of some of the eleventh grade girls and a former LIFE camper stopped by and together with one of our volunteer teachers, Miss Kanya, arranged a plan to send fifteen more girls to the annual LIFE camp next week -- this took a lot of phone calls but because the host church of LIFE camp reopened registration to fill up at the last minute, we are able to send this whole group. How we praise the Lord for Miss Kanya.