Our History
Most recently, in 2009, we went to the Bahamas, but it was no vacation! We worked with a small Bahamian church to operate a two-week Vacation Bible School (V.B.S.) / Day Camp for about 120 children, ages 3–18. About 70 percent of the children were Haitian refugee children. For them it was like Christmas in July. Each day began with worship songs, and then the children divided into different age groups for devotional messages, activities, crafts, and lunch. Our challenges included heavy rain, lots of mosquitoes and other bugs, heat and humidity, sunburn, and the challenges of working with refugee children who are hungry and have been abused. We enjoyed a day at a beach, and side trips to the straw market and aquarium.
In 2008, we went to several locations in the Philippines. We offered a two-day Vacation Bible School (V.B.S.) with about 120 kids at an elementary school near Tabaco City in Bicol. We visited a church where we had donated money to pay for a water pump and “comfort room” (restroom), gave out Bibles, made animal balloons, gave testimonies, and taught songs to the kids. We had another two-day VBS in Bulacan where we had 100 kids inside attending the V.B.S. and another 200 showed up outside. Some of our group took the 200 away and entertained them in order to keep them (and their noise) away from the 100 we were working with inside. After that, we worked at and sponsored a youth leadership retreat for 60 teens who could not otherwise afford it.
In 2007, we went to the Chippewa & Cree Indian Reservation in Montana. There, working with another organization and a local church, we conducted a V.B.S., painted the church we stayed at, and did yard and maintenance work at various schools and houses on the Reservation.
Our first trip to the Philippines was in 2006. We shared the gospel with a group of 400 college students in Bicol, visited a small church on an outlying island to help them make a concrete floor for their thatch-roof church building, saw an erupting volcano, shared the gospel with elementary school students in Quezon province, and about 200 high school students near Manila, and conducted an open-air worship event for 800 people in Bulacan. You can read about it at http://www.christianodyssey.com/07/FM07/0702philippines.htm
In 2005, we went with another organization to Tijuana, Mexico. In only four days, we helped build a house (the size of a double garage) for a poor family, did street evangelism, drama ministry and invited the neighborhood to an evening crusade.
Our mission-trip experiences began in 2004, with a visit to the Navajo Indian Reservation in Utah. We did maintenance on houses for poor families on the reservation and held a cultural evening where the local community was invited.