Summer Work Teams

Members of Knollwood/Redeemer teams take a break

We just finished with another successful work team season. I want to thank all who participated or enabled participants to come. We had teams from First Presbyterian Church of Colorado Springs, Scottsdale Bible Church from Arizona, First Reformed Church of Grandville, MI, and two churches from my hometown of Winston-Salem, NC: Redeemer Presbyterian and Knollwood Baptist. These teams play a crucial role in our ministry to Dominican teenagers. They do significant projects at camp. They pour into our local field ministry areas. They share their lives and smiles with lots of people they meet, building relationships in spite of language and cultural barriers. They also give new energy and perspective to those of us who work here every day, reminding us that we do, in fact, get to participate daily in some powerful things that God is doing in this country. Familiarity can leave you jaded to even the things you hold dearest. Thank you, friends, for reminding us of the blessings of being here.

It is hard to express the full impact of the work of these teams. The easiest thing to show is the physical impact. Following are some pictures of the projects they worked on. Several projects were started with teams in the Spring. Summer teams continued work on our new maintenance shop...

 ...and the fence along our entrance road...

...did some great landscaping...

... continued work on our kitchen extension...

  ...chopped wood for outreach camp bonfires and cookouts...

...and made way for a new gazebo at our challenge course.

These projects have a significant impact. Our small kitchen made it necessary for us to use the adjacent screen porch as a food prep area. Not ideal, but necessary.

This year we were able to expand and upgrade this space. The photo below was taken from the same place as the one above. We are not 100% finished yet, but already the space is a big improvement over what we had previously.

Our camp maintenance facilities were split between three different small shops. Two of them were located in places where noise and dust created problems. The new shop centralizes everything and makes way for future development of a national ministry office at camp and additional housing in our main lodge.