All the missionaries from our mission, GMSA, came to our camp for the annual missions conference. It is meant to be a time to regroup, talk about some mission business, and be spiritually refreshed. It was also quite the learning experience to host the conference! Every morning Bruno would need to set up the projector or sound equipment and I would go to town to get a van load of food for feeding 90 hungry missionaries! It was wonderful to meet all the missionaries and hear from Dr. Burggraff and Pastor Hixson.

Update:

Thank you for praying for the youth camp, it was a big success! When I was driving a van load of them to the bus station to head home, I asked what their favorite part of camp was. They answered “the preaching!” The second best part was the kayaks! it was the first time for most of them to try out a kayak!

Didn’t know these guys lived here too! After doing some research, I’m pretty sure these guys would only feel like a really bad bee sting for adults but the kids are much smaller, so pray we keep our house scorpion-free!

     We hope you had a wonderful Christmas season with family and friends! We had some virtual family times via Skype and celebrated with some mission family here.

     This year has certainly been different for us! Thank you so much for all your prayers and gifts to get us to Uruguay. Life has been pretty busy since our arrival. We have mostly moved into our new home and jumped into preparing for a busy camp season.

     Thank you for your prayers for Callie. We really saw a difference at the end of the school year, she was happy to go to school and without being prompted would try to use her spanish randomly. Now when she wants to name a bug she found or one of her stuffed animals they all have a Spanish sounding name.

     Since our arrival we’ve been busy preparing for the weekend retreats for young adults and women, hosting a 2 week work group from Pennsylvania, and maintaining the property during the constant rentals. We have been working on things around camp like re-tiling some of the cabins or laying a cement walkway to the men’s bathroom. One project is to make the future camp office livable for the maintenance man, Jorge, so that another room can be opened up for camp use. The pool also needs to be drained (it takes 5 hours), power washed (a 2 hour job) and then refilled (which takes almost 20 hours) every week to 10 days. Since this is our first year we are mostly preparing the camp property and the pastors are organizing the majority of the programing. This summer is more of an observational summer, where we get to experience the different camps.

     Now that our summer is underway we began January 9th with our first week of camp. It was youth camp which is for ages 13 to 25ish and we had 70 young people attend. The GMSA missions conference ended last week and there were missionaries that came from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and the USA! Business meetings were intermixed with some down time and most importantly biblical teaching. Thank you for praying for all the decisions that had to be made. The missionaries were encouraged and refreshed during their time here.

     The last weekend of January we had our first Father Son retreat. Although not too many came, it was still a great time of relationship building and biblical challenges for both fathers and sons. Followed by kids camp the first full week in February the 6th thru the 10th. Family camp begins the 20th of February and run till the 25th.

     We have a work team coming the 4th of March from Appalachian Bible College staying through the 11th. They will be building a low ropes course and a new playground.

     Please be praying for this Summer of ministry.

Pictures:

Well, the weather sure feels like it! We had a great Christmas together. Our family celebrated the morning as just the four of us then had other missionary friends over for the rest of the day. And Christmas wouldn’t be complete without a dip in the pool! Thanks to technology we were able to Skype with our family and even be there via video for Christmas morning at Audrey’s parents, which was great.