Children Too

This is about our trip to Ukraine.

It was cheaper to take a bus to Tallinn, Estonia, and then fly back to Riga, and finally to Kiev, then it was to get a direct flight from Riga. So we were in Tallinn for a few hours, and it was beautiful. We took a lot of great shots. The down side to that plan was that I didn't get any sleep at all, so I felt pretty awful the first day we were in Ukraine. 

The specific camp we helped out with was called, "Social Services Camp," because the children were invited by social services to the camp. Most of them were coming from families afflicted with alcoholism, abuse, or prostitution. I enjoyed the camp a lot, though it was tiring. Everyone had assigned jobs and when not at those  posts we were engaging the kids. I liked the schedule a lot because it afforded me very specific times during the day when I could spend time with God. During free times I spent quite a bit of time with an older boy (I believe 15yo) named Viktor. He improved my fut'ball skills and we had a interesting time trying to communicate. He knew a bit of English but not much. I roomed with great kids and though I couldn't communicate much with them, my hope is that they felt loved by myself and the other counselors. At the end of the camp we handed out bibles and the children were delivered back to their situations. Though it seems grim, it is not rare for God to use children to change a family.

Jeremiah's Hope does a lot of really incredible things in Ukraine here is the website: http://jeremiahshope.org/

Now I will talk about the last camp we did called "New Hope."

New Hope was in Latvia and was far more exhausting than Jeremiah's Hope which was the camp we worked in Ukraine. It was exhausting because our purpose (and our pleasure) was to engage the kids 100% of the time. This camp was for teens living in orphanages and had a lot of unique challenges. The director of the camp estimated that 85% percent of the children's parents were still alive. What typically happens, is that children are neglected or abused by alcoholic parents and the state takes them away. The state gives parents opportunities to rehabilitate and regain custody of their children, but the parents often choose alcohol over their children. In working with the boys there was definitely a shared anger and defiance that came with their circumstances. I found that many of the boys sought negative attention and so I typically just ignored them when they were misbehaving.

Many of the kids begin smoking at very young ages and have addictions in their early to mid teens. There was one day I caught a girl smoking in the woods; later I grabbed a translator and told him to tell her, "I don't know why you smoke, but I think it is because you don't understand how valuable you are. For punishment you must say, 'I am really beautiful and wonderful,' three times. I think it was amusing for all of us.

Though I felt close to most of the boys in my cabin, I spent most of my time with the youngest boy at the camp, Ilja. He loved swimming and fishing and enjoyed the ropes course thoroughly. One day, I caught the boys doing something that kids do, that is rather dangerous. They were practicing asphyxiation and I told them that they needed to stop because they could potentially die. Later that day something seemed very wrong with Ilja, so I went with him and Zarina (a translator who also had a personal connection with Ilja) to a quiet place to talk. Zarina told me (that is, what he told her) that the boys had been using an asphyxiation technique on Ilja and he passed out. After he passed out, he said that he saw two roads one leading to bright light and the other leading to a fiery pit. Though he tried to steer himself towards the light he could not control his movements and he walked towards the fiery pit. As he teetered on the edge he regained consciousness and the boys were shaking him. It must have been a truly terrifying experience, I was speechless. After a while he asked why he was walking towards Hell, and I told him (through Zarina) that it was because his sin nature naturally causes him to, but that God wants to take him down the other path, to light.

One of the kids in my room stole my phone, and I found a bunch of accessories (cables, case etc...) under his bed. I never found my phone, and although many of the kids were looking for it, and interrogated my roommates, I think they got scared and ditched it somewhere. The kid who stole it made me a bracelet though, so I'll consider it a trade. I'm really glad that we made that trade, it became such a camp issue I think it brought a lot of glory to God through the conversations the kids had resulting.

I unfortunately had to leave early, and one of my brothers gave me a really valuable word before I left. It was an incredible, and exhausting time. I loved hearing the testimonies of all the counselors, and I have a lot of hope for the kids who came to camp.