All 12 guys from our squad were able to spend a month together at a ministry called Jeremiahs Hope located near Kiev, Ukraine. Jeremiahs Hope is a place that serves mainly as a Christian summer camp. In addition to camp they keep in contact with the kids they meet by making monthly visits to the kids’ homes, they provide a rescue shelter for kids without a home, and serve a host site for other ministries and camps.
Our job for the month mainly involved construction projects around the camp. We were kept busy building benches, book shelves, a chicken coupe, making a cement sidewalk, hanging rain gutters, building and painting a fence, and putting up new basketball hoops.
In addition to the above projects, we were able to work with another ministry that came to use the facilities for an English language camp. The group came out from a college in Kiev and they use teaching English as a way to introduce Christianity to the students. They were from all different backgrounds including an atheist from Syria, three Muslims from China, and some Orthodox and Muslims from Ukraine. We were able to work one on one with the students to help them learn English and discussion questions involved different topics from the Bible which opened the doors for conversations about Christianity. It was a fun and challenging weekend overall but a lot of good conversations took place and the gospel was shared with several nonbelievers.
During our final few days at the Jeremiahs Hope we ran a camp for 12 teenage boys. Most of the kids at camp came from family backgrounds where physical abuse and alcohol abuse are big problems. We even had a few kids come straight from jail. Knowing the background of the kids, we based the theme of the camp around giving the boys hope for a better future with Jesus as Lord of their life. We shared testimonies, watched movies together, ate a lot of food and had a lot of fun playing soccer, frisbee, pool, and ping pong.
Overall it was an amazing month spent with the men. I was able to learn a lot from them and enjoyed spending more time getting to know them better. I also enjoyed serving Jeremiahs Hope and the amazing ministry they have working with at risk children in Ukraine.
