"Lord, I don't ask that I should win, but please, please don't let me finish behind Akabusi."
Summer Camp
In August our Ukrainian partner, Zhenya, ran two weeks of children’s camps with a total of 63 children. 23 children were from families who had lost fathers in the war and 20 children were from families from or dysfunctional families or from orphanages.
Zhenya wrote: “These weeks took lots of energy, but it was rewarding is to see children’s smiles and joy. Also one common thing we could see – for the first two days children were withdrawn and didn’t want to participate in games sometimes, but in the last 3 days their behaviour, approach, mood were changed. That was blessing to see such changes".
“The goal of the camp was to build relationships with the families and children who lost fathers in the war. So now we have good relationship with 23 children from such families. It was great to get messages from their mothers with words of thanks for such great time their children had. We also have numbers of kids from dysfunctional families who also built relationships with us. And these children also were invited to continue to participate with us. We can’t help many children, but if we can impact these 40 -60 kids. It will be great influence to their life. And maybe we can create a model that other organizations and ministries can follow. So from the second half of September we will start our weekly sport programme for these children.
“We also built great relationships with a foundation which works with families of soldiers who have been killed and they were so happy that we are starting a weekly sport programme for these children. They told us that many organizations work with mothers and widows of soldiers, but so few work with their children. So they are happy that we will do such thing. For us it is also good to partner with organizations, already involved with this ministry and we can help them to fill that gap towards ministry to children”.
