News from Merlyn and Mario Milhomem: July 2010

We began planning this camp in January. We chose 20 kids from the Terceiro Espaço ministry to participate, but in the end only 9 ended up comming, but on the last day we received several phone calls and ended up having many kids we did not expect, half of them were poor and some showed up in fancy cars with fancy luggage and lots of stuff. We wanted to have 40 kids with us, and to our surprise we began the opening night with 36....half rich and half poor...just as we had hoped at the beginning!

Looking back, I see that God chose each one very specifically! About half of the kids were from broken homes, regardless of their family´s finacial situations...and I believe that is what brought them together in such amazing unity!

Every day we had times of prayer and worship...

Since our goal was to include many non-believers, we invited ``Aunt Eunice`` and her puppet ``Zoca`` to share the plan of salvation on the first day.

Kids, teens and adults all loved ``Zoca``.

We had about 10 kids give their lives to the Lord that day! Praise God!

We also had other presentations during the camp. One of the most important ones was about drugs and bullying, which are huge problems kids face in schools here in Brazil.

Darlan did a great job presenting and also answering the kids´ many questions...

We served the kids 3 hearty meals and a snack each day. In 15 days the kids ate 910 loaves of bread!!

After breakfast they had an hour alone with God and meditated on a specific passage each day. This was something very new to many of them.

We divided all the kids into 3 ``families``. Mario and I were the mom and dad for one of the families (we had 12 kids!). The kids even called us ``pai`` and ``mae`` (dad and mom). My daughters loved kissing my stomach, which has begun to show (at almost 4 months now)! In my opinion we had the best kids ever! I loved discipling them and having family time together. We were surprised to find that for many of them, the family time was their favorite event of the day too!

Every day the kids had to do a small chore to keep things in order...

We received a lot of beans as a donation,

but they came full of sticks and rocks so the kids helped pick these out...

Jonas made lots of new friends...

One of the things that filled my heart with joy was to see how he brought kids from two different worlds together. This is a picture of two of our kids Luisa and Zé (you may remember Zé from a posting from the last King´s Kids camp). Luisa is from an extremely rich family (her dad is my doctor since I got pregnant, and that´s how she ended up comming when I went for my last check up two days before the camp started) and Zé is from the neighborhood next to the base, which is a slum. They got along like true sibblings!

The kids also learned dance (choreography)...

...and Drama...

Notice Jonas´arm! He broke it two days into the camp, but did not refuse his important role as God in one of the skits. He is resilient! He did a great job too!

The last day of the training (before going out to do evangelism) we did some team-building dynamics in which they had to learn to help each other in order to win.

We began our evangelism strategy with a soccer tournament. We invited 4 teams (6 with ours) from the surrounding neighborhood and competed with them.

We told our kids that the objective was not to win but to be a good example, something they had a hard time accepting at first,

but in the end everyone was in good spirits as our team of under 12 years old lost 12 to 0!

Since Jonas couldn´t play because of his broken arm,

he cheered the team on and entertained us with his humor and `´rapping``

and of course, Mario (who loves a mic. too) helped out as a good dad should!...

At the end of the games the kids presented some dances and a skit

Jonas did a great job as God in his first public presentation !

These three kids are all kids at risk (the two on the sides are brothers)

Some of the kids from the other teams looked on with interest while others chatted on...

At the end Mario did and alter call and prayed for all the teams.

The next day we rented a bus and took all the kids to a really big and fancy church here in Goiania where they presented two dances and a skit, for which they received a standing ovation!