English is a huge way that ministry happens at WonGen. It is not the only thing that we focus on, but it does seem to be one of our more consistent ministry opportunities. Over the last week, we put on our second English camp.

Our first English camp was a huge success. After the camp, our class sizes greatly increased, and we had a much more consistent group of people that spend time hanging out at the coffee shop. Because of this success, we were very excited about this second camp. Now that it is over, we couldn’t be happier.

For this camp, we had a group of 34 people who headed to the highest place in Thailand, Doi Inthanon. We managed to find a nice little camp near a few waterfalls. At this camp site we had trails to hike on, places to make fire, and plenty of room to run around and be loud (Loud is very important with this group). Finding this camp site really made the camp a lot more fun.

Though there was a lot of time to just chill and have a good time, we also had some structured events. The big event we had at this camp was a Lord of the Rings adventure hike. At the beginning of the hike, we had a short monologue about the adventure they would undertake. Each group of Thai students then received a ring of power, and they were sent off on their journey with other members from the fellowship of the ring. On their journey, they had to interact with different characters from the books and movies. Some of the stops made them practice their English skills, and other places they had to overcome obstacles through teamwork. At the very end of the journey, they all got to throw their rings into the fires of Mount Doom and return to the Shire.

Besides this adventure, we had many more activities at this camp. Most of the activities included hiking, so everyone was quite tired by the time that we were returning home.
In the end, we are all very happy about the way that this camp turned out. More than half of the students that came to this camp were different students from the first camp. The relationships we have with students has now gone deeper. This is the whole reason we even have the camps. We want to know each of the students better, and we want them to know us better. There is why we live the lives that we do as Christians. When people spend time with us, they get to see Jesus in a real and vivid way. Christ shines through us when we allow him. We want each and every single student we have to see this clearly.

We pray that each student was able to see this during English camp, and we continue to work with them now that camp is over.