Family Camp and a Mass Wedding...!

During my week in Mindoro I was involved in a family camp that was going on at the base.  Two social workers employed by MWBPI spent weeks going around villages in the area interviewing families, and offered some of the poorest families to come to a camp held at the base.  70 families; over 400 people got involved and spent 3 days at the Centre, learning what the bible teaches about marriage and parenthood so that families would be strengthened. They also had seminars and activities on how to build strong and healthy communities.  There was a mixture of Tagalog and Katatubo people at the Camp.

I led one of the small discussion groups with one of the Philippino pastors every morning after the main seminar to talk about what had just been shared and to pray together.

One afternoon everyone was split into 4 groups, and the groups rotated around 4 different stations; soap making, dental care, hygiene workshop and arts and crafts.  I led the hygiene workshop together with 2 nursing students from Norway.  We taught the importance of hand washing, washing clothes and cleaning the skin.  As I've explained in a previous blog post, many of the natives live in very poor and basic conditions so hygiene is a very strange concept for them.  During the camp we found many using water from the toilet to wash and drink because they didn't know what it was for.  Just teaching basic cleanliness will hopefully prevent a lot of sicknesses.  We had buckets of water lined up in a row and gave the parents the opportunity to bath their children, then we gave them new and clean clothes. There were smiles all round! Most of the children had head lice, and many of them had huge distended stomachs because of intestinal worms.  We tried our best to help them but we knew as soon as they would go home they would just return.

The following day the three of us taught basic First Aid to the campers- concentrating on CPR, wound care, burns and choking.
In the afternoon it was time for the campers to go home, but before leaving they were all given a certificate acknowledging that they attended the camp. Many of the campers have never been in education, they can't read and write and definitely never had a certificate before.  Seeing the smiles on their faces as they received the certificate was amazing, and even though some held it up side down, the pride shone through in their faces.

All of the campers were given a bible, and those who were illiterate had an MP3 player that had the bible on it so that they could listened to the word of God.  Over 40 people made the decision to receive Jesus into their lives during the camp :)





It was also amazing to see a mass wedding taking place at the base in Mindoro.  In many of the communities on the island a marriage is more of an agreement between both families allowing the couple to be together.  Getting married is too expensive for many people here, so if both families agree, then the couple are counted as being married.  Many of them however desire to be legally married so MWB arrange a day for them to come to the base and get married! Around 20 couples got married that day :)