Outreach to Slovakia April 7-14, 2006

The week before Easter Ken led a parade of Czech translators to Liptosky Mikulas in Slovakia to minister with MCYM in their annual Service Project.

Linda also drove one of the 5 cars on the 10 hour journey through snow filled mountains and beside flood-level rivers. The 25 Czechs were quickly assigned to one of the 13 sites that the 750 American military youth came to bless. This was our 6th year that we have partnered with this exciting ministry. For those of you who do not know, Military Community Youth Ministries is an organization that conducts weekly Christian clubs on American military bases. Once a year all the European clubs join together for a Service Project to build playgrounds for schools and share their Christian lives in classes and in an afternoon VBS-type club for the younger kids or a youth club meeting for the older ones.

Ken was assigned to help the construction team, went from site to site delivering material, made sure all was well and generally handled many of the spontaneous problems that always seem to arise.

Linda was assigned to be the head Relational Minister at the Basic School in a small village called Kvacany. This school had 750 students from 1st to 9th grades coming from 10 different surrounding villages. We sent 3 teams a day into English classes and in the afternoon we ended up having 3 after-school clubs: one for 1-3 graders, one for 4-6th graders and one for 7-9th graders. All staffed with volunteer military teens and their leaders and only 4 translators. The Principal thought that not many kids would be able to come but we ended up with 80 kids each day. Each evening the MCYM team had club for their teens and were able to challenge them to grow in their faith. By the end of the week God was able to greatly impact many Czechs, Slovaks and American teens and I am sure many adults too.
On the final day of the project each site had a community celebration. Linda's site included a ribbon cutting ceremony, the children performing for us and we put on a passion skit for them and their parents, relatives and friends who joined us for the celebraton. Even the mayor attended.