Romania Team – Update #9
Day #6 of camp (testimonies and leave-taking)
There was no leaders meeting on Saturday morning, allowing all of us an hour or so of extra sleep before we had to be packed and out of our rooms/cabins at the camp. We all had one more meal together with the students (breakfast), and then we went up to the tent to have more worship and to hear testimonies from the kids. The kids were slow to come up at first, and what they shared was mostly: “I liked the camp; it was great.” But then a few of the kids began sharing more openly, revealing how God had worked in their hearts through this camp, and then it was a steady stream of kids coming up and telling, sometimes with tears in their eyes, what this camp had meant to them and their spiritual lives. The girl I had spoken to came up to share her testimony, and I know many of us had the same experience of seeing kids we had befriended come up; our teammember Zach also went up and shared his own testimony of how the camp had affected him, and I believe many of the kids were given boldness to share more vulnerable stories because of his example.
After testimonies, we had about an hour to clean up the camp before they started driving the kids to the train station, so we all pitched in to clean up and ate some snacks before beginning to make our goodbyes; several of the kids we knew we would see at the after party in Medgidia the next day, so the leave-taking was not too painful – it was still very sad to see them leave after building relationships with so many of them. Emma decided to return to Medgidia on the train with the kids so that she could spend just a little more time with them. The rest of us went in different cars driven by the leaders. Isabelle, Riley, and Tyler had a bit of an adventure on their way back: their van broke down in the middle of the highway, and they were pulled off to the side of the road wondering how they would get back to Medgidia. Randomly, a tow truck pulled up in front of them only a few minutes later and the driver asked if they needed help. He towed them to a gas station where one of the other leaders were able to pick them up and bring them back to the community center where the rest of us were waiting.
Although there was an uncomfortably long period of time before we found the keys to the air conditioned bedrooms (during which we flopped on the entrance way floor trying to keep cool (Kimberly said we looked like the boneless chickens from The Far Side cartoon)), we did eventually get the key and we all slept very hard that night.
Praise God that camp ended well and that we all made it safely back to Medgidia that day. Please pray now for the Romanian leaders in their follow up with the kids, and for the youth programs they are working to spread to other cities in the southern Romania region.
Please also pray for our team as we are now in Vienna beginning our debrief time.
