I am so glad to be able to write to you about the summer I have had. That is part of the reason why I have not been very active on my blog. I have not been home much and I have not had much access to the internet over the past 2 1/2 months.
It all started with the first week of June, when we began teaching day camps to children in the villages of Moldova. In the Spring, I met with our teams and we planned to have 10 day camps (5 day long camps from Monday to Friday) in 10 different locations over a 5 week period. We taught several different Bible study courses for kids as well as common sense activities that people with good home training practice. We teach the kids how to be grateful, how to say thank you, how to be a good friend, how to respect their elders, the importance of keeping our environment clean etc. It is mostly stuff that we take for granted and assume that kids are taught. The problem in Moldova is, there are many parents who are working in other countries and are not home to teach their kids these things. The Bible studies that were taught were, “Lord, teach me to pray”, based on the Lord’s Prayer, “Lord, what is Your name” based on the Names of God in the Bible, and “Wrong way Jonah”. I was able to offer baseball practices and games at a few of the camps. While doing the camps, we saw an opportunity to do 2 more camps (one of my helpers organized a camp in her town after seeing how we do things and that camp led to another one in the neighboring town). In all, we organized 12 day camps with over 1,000 kids. Most of the kids asked us to stay with them for the entire summer because one week was just not enough. So, to keep it short, that was the month of June and the first week of July.
In July, we traveled to Romania to a training session where we also graduated from the Inductive Bible study Institute as trainers. For 10 12 straight days we studied the St. Paul’s epistle of Colossians. It was an amazing study on how to keep from being led astray by false teachings within the church and also outside of the church. Our dear teachers Mia and Costel Oglice did a wonderful job leading the session. The icing on the cake was the fact that we graduated as trainers. It was a real blessing for us. I was able to see some of my Polish students graduate from the Institute as well. After the session, we traveled back to Moldova where we had just a couple of days to prepare for the English Summer camp.
This year, we studied the book of Judges during the 10 day English camp. There were close to 250 campers, including almost 50 public school teachers. It was a great camp. There were many Americans who came to help us as teachers. The teams were from North Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Missouri. All of the teachers did a wonderful job and the students were taught how to be leaders in their areas of influence. God blessed the time greatly. Each evening, Vasile Filat preached one of the 10 commandments and made it relevant to the 21st Century. Many of the students prayed the prayer of salvation over the course of the camp. Immediately after the English camp, we had a festival to celebrate 23 years of ministry in Moldova for Precept Ministries International Eurasia branch and 15 years since the first Institute was formed. There were about 175 participants, both current and former students of the Institute as well as teachers and leaders. Mia and Costel Oglice came and taught Obidiah and Joel during the 5 day festival. There were many testimonies of the results of the ministry over the past 23 years.
While at all of the camps and activities, our kids got strep throat and then Emmi’s turned into an ear infection so we have been battling that since the end of the festival.
On Monday (today) we were supposed to begin our youth camp where we were hoping for close to 80 young people to join us. There was some government intervention at the last minute and we were not able to use the campsite so we had to cancel the camp (after spending 2 days searching for a new site). We will now spend the rest of the month of August preparing for our school activities which will begin on the 1st of September. We will begin our youth meetings once again as well as start teaching in the public schools and doing day camps during the Fall break during the first week of Oct.
Thank you for all of your prayers. It has been a wild summer and the Lord has greatly blessed us. We have worked hard and we know that the fruit will come at the right time. We are also preparing to welcome Brewer baby number 3 in November. I hope your summer has been an interesting one as well.
Erik and Elena Brewer's Weblog 