Like usual we went to the sea. In the afternoon we started with a game called Bible Smugglers. We talked briefly about how the Bible is so important that people risk their lives to get it to people. The idea is to get the paper Bibles to the persecuted church without being caught by the secret police who will take your bibles from you. The funny thing is that I told the kids that the persecuted church would be hidden outside, but I forgot to them to hid outside. So they were hidden inside the guard shack, the actual guard standing guard. The kids had to notice them in the window and then throw the Bibles through. In 20 minutes the only received 17 bibles, of the 200-300 Bibles passed out. But the kids had fun.
This was followed by the closing ceremony. We did a slightly different theme so that we could change up the MCs. Earlier during camp one of the team members was helping one of our Ukrainian team members with a lesson on gullibility. They spun this crazy story about a midnight train that comes through Hope Center. Well played enough that some of our team members were really questioning if it was real. Our MC's took this idea and ran with it. Telling the story about the train as the team of the closing ceremony. The stage was the train. It was very well done. And then 3 acts. The heavens opened up and poured out. We had just enough time to tell the kids to go back to their wards and that there they would have a surprise.
The trick is that we didn't know what the surprise was. We had 45 minutes before supper and it was now a torrential down pour. We had planned to give each kid a gift after the closing ceremony. So instead we did this now. The trick was getting all the gifts from our building through the rain to theirs. With the help of a few towels and plastic bags we made it. A few bags got in the wrong places which caused a little confusion and panic as we thought some kids didn't have gifts, but we figured it out. This was followed by bringing Christeena's Butterfly craft to each of the individual wards to do. This was thrown together last minute and we forgot to explain the craft to each person leading it and in one group forgot to include the butterfly piece. Which made it a little trick to carry out. But filled the time til supper. At this point the the rain had started to let up.
So after supper we finished the closing ceremony. While Emily set up the entire craft so that afterwords we could go directly to the craft time. The craft was a verse book. The first verses were pre-printed armor of God passages. The second was a first they had to write in to get the idea that the rest were for verse they had to write in. It was Psalms 27:1 (Which in the Russian Bible is Psalm 26:1). Then the rest they left blank. However, for the cover of the book each of them were given a picture of themselves.
While working on craft the thunder started again. And although it was not raining yet, we anticipated that it would start and therefore did not take out the music equipment to do the songs for the bonfire. As we got all the kids around the fire pit. The counselors helped pass out glow bracelets to all the kids, which were an absolute hit. Usually we make a big deal about starting the fire, however it started sprinkling and without any way of getting their attention (no microphones or speakers to make the amount of noise necessary to do this) we just started the fire. Then worked together to sing, and get the kids to sing, as many songs necessary to set up the slide show in the dining room. The songs were interesting as there wasn't enough volume from one location to keep everyone together so we had an echo effect. The actions to all the songs helped until the fire died down from the rain enough to not give much light. By the time we were losing our voices, they had just finished setting up and the kids went to go watch the slide show.
The slide show was great. The music got the kids involved to the point of clapping to the beat with one song, and pounding on the tables in another. All the while screaming for just abut every pictures that popped up every 3 seconds for almost 20 minutes. I'm surprised if any child had a voice after that. As the slide show finished the kids had just enough time to get back to their wards as the heavens opened again and flooded the Hope Center. The water poured through the streets like roaring rivers (you may think this is an exaggeration as I am prone to doing that yet in most all places the water was 1/2 inch deep and in one place it was 4 inches deep). The water poured off the roofs like waterfalls. So after we said goodnight to the kids, we played outside in the water.
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