The Youth Camp was a really good experience overall. It was made up mostly of people our age -- either in university, just before, or just after. It was interesting to get to see the way they run things: on one side the way they have things set up is very similar to the way they are at the Nav conferences in the US; but at the same time much of the substance/presentation, etc. was very much different. There were some speakers, some Bible studies, some workshops, devotions, singing, games, entertainment, and food. It's funny that the last sentence still perfectly the way things would be at home too, but there's a lot different -- kind of. It's hard to explain some of the subtle distinctions over the computer, but I'll try to at least give a small idea....
Their praise and worship is extremely genuine and really neat to get to see and be a part of. Most of the time when they pray in groups, instead of kind of speaking up one at a time as we usually do in such situations in the US, they just all pray out loud at the same time. It's really cool to hear the room kind of just swell up with the sound of a group of people softly praying out loud all at once. One other slight difference is that they seem to spend a lot more time working straight out of the Bible even in talks and presentations and such. Whereas I'm used to speakers interspersing stories, comments, ruminations, etc., they for the most part just jump from scripture to scripture. It can be good, but personally it was a bit exhausting the first day, with me being used to more of a variety of style. Friday morning I was literally reading the Bible for like 6 or 7 hours stright. The Ghanains like to go straight to the Truth....
Again, it's kind of hard to explain the diffences not in person, but it really was a great experience overall and the stuff they're doing at the camp really was awesome.
One thing that was a bit different from our very few expectations was just how thriving the Ghana Navs ministry is. I (and most others on the team) had gotten the impression that Navs here could really use our help and we would kind of have some leadership role in the camp. But we ended up being participants just like everyone else present for the most part. It's kind of cool to just be able to jump in with another strong community of believers and just be able to live alongside them. While some of our methods of practices may be subtly different, we're all working to know Christ and make him known; it really does feel like one big Christian family (-- again, the fact that the Ghanaians are so incredibly welcoming and friendly plays a big part in this).
Some of the same people whom we went to Nkum with for the missions trip were at the camp (as both officials and participants), so it was also really great to know them going into it and to get to spend some more time with them. We also got to share with the other pepole at the camp (about 80) what went on in Nkum for a brief while on Sunday night. I shared some thoughts and two quick stories, the one about giving the woman and her son a New Testament, and one about this one older gentleman in one of the bigger villages [see next entry....].
Tomorrow we're going to take a day trip with our team and some Ghana Navs friends to Cape Coast to see the old slave castle and to walk some canopy bridge [?] or something of that sort lol. After that, the about half of our team will be leaving on Friday -- which is really had to beleive. I guess the trip is somewhere right around halfway through as of today. So the big parts of the missions work is over now (the Nkum mission and the Youth Camp) and we'll have to see exactly what the rest of us end up doing in the last two weeks.... We're thinking of maybe trying to help out at an orphanage in or around Accra... we'll see....
God bless from Ghana!
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