Lets take a trip back in time to when we were all
kids.
  Do you remember sitting in class
on the last day of school before summer and watching the clock slowly tick
away, waiting for the blessed sound of the bell signaling that school was over
for the year.
  Do you remember thinking
about all the great times that you would have with your friends and going to
the pool?
  But there was one event that
made the hair on the back of our neck stand on end with excitement.
 
SUMMER CAMP!!!!
 

            This
last weekend we held an orphan camp and it was a lot like a 2 day summer camp
to the orphans of our little community of Ntabamhloshana (dabamshoshana).
  About 400 orphans came and it was nuts.
  We bussed them all in to a little community
center and had tons of games and jumping castles.
  It was crazy.

            I
was driving a group of kids, actually about 30 of them in a little mini van,
and the feeling in the air was awesome.
 
It was that nervous and excited tension of going away for the night to
do things that you only get to do at camp.
 
It was so great.
  And the feeling
built and the noise got louder as we got closer to the camp.
  And then as we pulled over the hill and you
could see the camp and the jumping castles, it was totally silent.
  They were so pumped.
  It was a blast.
 

            Orphan
camp happens about once every year.
  It
is a nutty event, all the kids sleep in the same room and, that's right, we get
to sleep with them.
  Its like a giant
slumber party.
  We brought a projector
this time and showed the movie CARS.
 
They loved it.
  Another thing that
is tradition at orphan camp is that we kill a cow for all to enjoy.
  Sometimes it is the only meat that these kids
get to eat.

            One of the coolest things
that we got to do was our little VBS lesson we did for all 400 kids.
  It was pretty much organized chaos.
  We acted out the story of the wise and
foolish builder and then we all made little houses out of craft sticks and
construction paper.
  It was great, glue
was everywhere.
  We sang tons of songs
and had a memory verse that they would get candy for if they could remember it
later in the day.
 

            I think that the reason I
loved it so much was because we got to just love on the kids.
  We got to be mama and papa for a couple of
days and just love them like Jesus.
  For
2 days they felt accepted and valued.
 
For 2 days they were not orphans or kids with AIDS.
  For 2 days they got to be normal kids.