The past few days we have been working at a camp near Cacak (Chawchuk), Serbia. The camp was recently purchased by Child Evangelism Fellowship of Serbia for use during their summer camps. The first of four camps began this afternoon and they expect between 40 and 50 students at each camp.
Our time was spent helping the groups prepare the camp grounds as until this year they had only rented the camp. It was intense labor and we are all sore for our troubles. For example, we helped assembled a tent where they’ll hold all of their meetings, repaired a trampoline, hauled massive rolls of carpet up to an attic, dug out a 50 foot row of hedges using spades, a pickaxe, and an axe. We collected a mountain of branches that had been cut for a giant bonfire, took out the compost dump, cleaned out a few cabins and rooms of garbage, etc. We stayed very busy. To give you a reference point, I consumed over 8 liters of water yesterday and didn’t go to the bathroom until heading to bed. It didn’t help that it was rather warm and I was sweating like crazy swinging an axe to try and cut the roots of the hedges so we could get them out of the ground.
But, the awesome thing was that as we left today, the camp was fully prepared. Our team contact Karl talked about how he didn’t think he would have all of the projects accomplished before all of the camps were over. It was encouraging to come alongside this group and help them to accomplish the mission God has set before them. Yeah for sore muscles, a few cuts and scrapes, and some fireweed rash if we can facilitate others in what they are doing to share Jesus with the country of Serbia.
Tent where they will hold the evening meetings. We even got to scrub the wooden benches mutliple times with laundry detergent so they were clean enough to sit on.
We chopped down the hedges from where I am standing to the white building in the distance. It was brutal and all of our hands and forearms are ridiculously sore today.
