Young Life Beach Party (and all about Young Life Camp)

Yesterday was our first full day back home (if you're wondering where we were, see HERE). We went for lunch with Ev and then headed to the Young Life beach party. Well, Steve headed there and the boys and I came home so August could nap....but AFTER that, the rest of us headed to the party too!

They had all sorts of fun water games planned and had set up a slip and slide. Young Life also recently purchased a generator so they were playing music and had lights set up for the evening. 

Ruslan's family owns some gelato carts so they provided some ice cream for the event. I never knew pineapple ice cream would be so amazing!

Ruslan doing what Ruslan does:

I came across this Hula Girl...

 Some friends - the two on the outside are the "neighbourhood guys" that we first met when they started coming to supper club at New Hope Center. They are coming to Young Life camp next week!!

We're getting excited for Young Life camp next week! We will head to Chernigiv (near Kiev) next Sunday night and will spend the week at camp. YL Camp is the BIG event of the year - each leader in Young Life invites a group of kids who they have had a relationship with over the past year to come to the camp. They spend the whole camp week together doing fun activities as well as talking about God and what it means to follow Him. Lots of kids come to Christ each year at the camp and when they come back home they are immediately started with mentors. They are discipled and brought into the church (usually the Baptist church here because they are the church that sponsors YL here in Zap) and each year they baptize more and more youth. It's an amazing ministry and they do it really well so it will be awesome to see what the camp itself is all about AND to see kids there this year that Steve and I have personally started relationships with, and now they want more. Steve will be a helper because obviously we need more language to go deeper in relationships and to explain Biblical truths, but he will be assisting our friend Ruslan whose group of guys are all friends with Steve so he'll be as involved as possible.