Odessa, Ukraine Part 1

Thursday morning, July 23rd, 4 of us left Clear Lake at 5 am to get up to Minneapolis. I travelled by myself to Chicago where I met up with Dan and John VanGerpen, another of our group, from California. Overnight, we flew to Germany, Romania, and then Odessa, Ukraine. We were met by a large group of people; our team members from Canada, Iowa, North Carolina, and California, and the Odessa team. From the airport, we travelled to the camp which is an hour outside of Odessa.

Saturday was spent training and preparing for the campers. We had a lot of planning to get ready for. There were 16 of us from Canada and the US. There is also a great team in Odessa. Since we had not all met, it was a great time getting to know each other as well as hearing what was needed from us. Sunday morning came very early. We started with worship time just for camp staff and then got ready for the campers. The students arrived right before lunch. After eating, some of us game them placements tests in order to put them in the right English class. I really enjoyed the testing time. Some of these kids did not speak a whole lot of English, but they were very nice. This was a good time to get to start relationships with some of them.

After testing we had the job of putting the in the proper classes. I'll explain later how the classes were split up. We had a short time meeting our Conversation Class before dinner. After dinner, we had some games and then an evening meeting. Our evening meetings were our only "preaching" type meetings. It was very exciting to see the progression of these evening services. Many of these kids knew very little about God. They really didn't even think about God. Many of the others are from the Orthodox church. We spent the week telling them about Christ little by little.