To the leaders of GAiN—thank you very much for the gift of $1000 that has been given for our summer camps!  Since our camp season has just begun we can’t tell what has been done to use the money but only what will be done.  We have lots of children who are not well fed at home.  We don’t have prizes for games that the children play.  We will use the money as well as we can – the children need health and positive motivation.  We plan to buy healthy food items like fruit, milk, yogurt, meat—things that will help to strengthen them.  Also we hope to have enough money to buy vitamins for the children.

There are 15 children that come each week to the church to receive a hot meal—they get nothing at home.  Others also are coming to camp from other areas who are in the same situation.  They total 24.  No one is paying for them to be able to attend the camp.  They are so poor that they have never seen simple things like chocolate or soft toys like Beanie Babies.

At camp there are 62 children—one-third are not believers.

For example yesterday evening, we had “evening candle.”  There were girls from poor social conditions. At this camp, they started turning to the Lord and praying. And yesterday, I loved the way they prayed. That during this five days at the camp, they really saw that Jesus is a friend. And the theme of our camp is friendship and we show it in our camp that the best friend is Jesus and that we are to be very careful in the way we choose our friends. And today I had such a joy when in the morning we had “Bible hour” and they recited perfectly the 5 bible verses we gave them during these camp days. And so we can tell that they really learned them and they understand them. I understand that they pray not only together but also on their own, because they run up to me and they say “I’ve been praying and the Lord told me something.”  

Some children prayed for good weather so that they could swim, and when we came to the camp it was very cold. But the next day the weather became hot and before that it had been so cold and it didn’t seem like it could possibly be hot. Many children said “Yes!! I had been praying for this.” One girl told me that she couldn’t swim, but she prayed about it and she learned to swim!

There are some boys who have such bad clothes and I’ve been thinking about where I could get some clothes. It is so interesting to watch them, and to see how they listen to the Bible stories. Even their Bible teacher had never seen them paying so much attention to it. And she really knows them and she was so surprised that they were so interested.  And at first when the kids came, our Christian songs were so strange for them. After three days, and I was going through the hallway and I heard some noise and I decided to see what was going on there. And there were no adults, but all of the children were singing. We just peeped in because we were so scared to disturb them. In our evening service, we call it- “orange,” they come and praise the Lord and show different skits they have learned. We have been there only five or six days. And I think that the more the better! And now unbelievers told us, we will never go to any other camp- only to this one. And they said, I will tell to my parents, I will never go anywhere else. And we can see such a good relationship between the counselors and the children. We are so thankful to the Lord when we look at these children. And we are praying to that some day we may have our own territory (property) where we can have these camps. because now the place where the camp is, is not big. It is so full that we cannot put another child in there and there are so many children who would love to come.  This is our great prayer and we pray as a church that the Lord would grant us an opportunity to buy land for a camp. We also have a desire to organize not only a summer camp but also a winter one.

Words cannot express our hearts full of thanks for your prayers and support with money to make it possible for children to realize their dream to come to camp.  Spaciba!             Tatiana Lapshova, Camp Director