Say among the nations, "The LORD reigns."

Wow, one week left. I'll admit, it seems absolutely crazy that my time here is so close to ending. Time has gone by so fast, and although I'm excited to see everyone back home, I'm not quite sure if I'm ready to leave yet. I've established so many new friendships with people here and have fallen in love with the program, kids and country. This summer has been amazing and once again, I can't thank you all enough for helping to make this trip possible for me.

This past week was another fairly large week. We had a youth group from Arizona with about 30 people, some individual volunteers, and then another small group from His House. This gave us a total about about 50-60 volunteers here for the week so we were able to do 4 camps, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. We also ended up splitting up even more so by then end of the week we had been in 4 different bateys doing camps, reading to kids, and playing baseball with some older teenagers, as well as having a camp at the baseball stadium down the street and a camp here at the orphanage for neighborhood kids! It was quite the week!

My job was this week was camp leader for the high school group and then two other interns. We had a rough start on Monday as the kids were put into leadership positions without a lot of guidance and started to get into the swing of things (also, not very many of them knew spanish!). And so Monday was a rough day for me, trying to organize everything, keep camp running smoothly, and allow the kids and volunteers to enjoy their time. Thankfully, God once again showed his faithfulness on Tuesday and camp went really well. It was amazing to see the change that took place and realize that God was with us, leading us and guiding us. It definitely reminded me once again how much we need God for even the smallest things that we often think we can do on our own. From Tuesday camp continued to go well both in the morning and the afternoon. We had around 60 kids in the morning and closer to 80 or 90 kids in the afternoon making for two fun camps that were fairly easy to maintain but still had a lot of energy :).

I also had a lot of fun this week getting to know some of the high schoolers and sharing a little bit of my life with them. We had a few non-Christians with their group and it was neat to see God begin to change their hearts a little bit and get them thinking about a lot of new things.

Today, we are just kind of hanging out. It's nice to be able to spend a lot of time with the kids here today and our time with them is starting to become really short. Today will also be a nice day to regroup and get ready for camp this week. We have 20 new volunteers coming in so we'll be doing two camps that should be a lot of fun since we will get to be all together for them.

Some specific prayer requests for this week would be: prayer once again for our camps at a batey called Manzanio and a nearby church; energy, organization, and teamwork amongst the new volunteers and interns; prayer specifically for the interns that we don't "check out" or become to involved in what we want to do in our last week here that we fail to provide a great experience for the one-week volunteers; and prayer for safe traveling and a smooth adjustment as most all of us head home on Saturday.

I guess that's all for now. Enjoy your week and I'm very much looking forward to seeing many of you when I get home next weekend! I'll be leaving here 2:30 AM Saturday morning and if all goes well, landing in Grand Rapids around 9:30 Saturday night. God Bless!

Alissa