Hello everyone!
Well, we've come to the end of our first Family Camp. We met some really wonderful people during this camp who we're really bummed are not from Cologne. The boys (there were no teenage girls this week) were truly great kids and Brandon and I really loved being around them. We did a Bible lesson with them each morning after breakfast: breakfast consists of cheese, cold cuts, bread, fruit, musli (a type of granola cereal) and, of course, nutella. You just pick and choose what you want, its a little different to eat a turkey sandwich for breakfast instead of lunch. The Bible lessons were supposed to be on friendship so we started our week doing shorter lessons with more object games and ended with more discussion oriented formats.
The kids here in Germany really have a lot more to struggle with than we do in America. For instance several of the kids do not even know one other Christian at their school. They literally don't have Christian friends aside from the 6 or 7 kids in their youth group. The culture over hear is very atheistic or Islamic and the majority of people think that believing in a God is completely ludicrous and crazy. Really pray for them, it is a tough and not very open mission field and it is really a struggle for each person they witness too. Also, the culture is different here. For example, violence is a bigger taboo than sexuality. It's kind of weird when you think about it: how we have allowed ourselves to be desensitized by killing and death and they have allowed themselves to be desensitised by sexuality. Anyway, our job for the week has been to serve as youth interns for these kids who have never had a youth minister and probably never will, especially with the bad economy causing missionaries to have a harder time raising funds for these type of "non-essentials".
We really grew to feel close to these families and learn a lot from them. Brandon and I spent a lot of time also talking with the adult missionaries, Bill Wilson and Kyle & Susan Bratcher, about what it is like to do missions in this kind of field, and raise a family in the mission field and deal with cultural differences when raising kids (for instance, the drinking age is 16 in Germany and the driving age is 19). I also got to talk a lot with Bill's youngest daughter who is married to a German and living in Germany with their 3 kids about what it was like to grow up a missions kid etc...
We've also had a some fun this week, one of the families at the camp, the Hughes family (made up of Tony the dad from Britain, Suzanna the mom from Heidleheim, Marc and Justin the two teenage boys) decided to take a short trip to Usingen, a little village about 10 minutes from camp. They invited us to go to town with them so we jumped at the chance to see a little bit more of Germany. We had cappuccinos, went to the bank and were even asked directions by a German guy. This was on Thursday and was really a wonderful hour with them. (today July 4th Tony jokingly wished us a "happy traitors day", Again he's British!).
By the end of Today, Saturday, we had said goodbye to our friends from week 1 and the majority of the families for week 2 had arrived. This week will surely be different, everyone here is actually German and not as many people speak English. Everyone we've met so far has been very nice and supportive and very willing to help us learn German. ( Although, for the life of me I can not say Cologne correctly!) Again our job will be to work with the youth, speaking with them to improve their English and letting them know that while they may be the only teen Christians in the district, they are not the only ones in the world.
Thank you all for your love and prayers. We love you all and really wish you were here!
Love, Sierra and Brandon
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