In previous years, the summer was a quieter time for our Living Water Adopt-A-Child programmes in Albania. The schools close in June for three months, so there were not so many children around the villages; some away with parents working in other areas, others helping on the land.

Also, historically our ministry team would be busy hosting and looking after groups of sponsors and supporters from abroad visiting the ministry over the summer months.  However, this year, with travel restrictions meaning that people in Albania are not travelling around so much and international travellers are not able to visit the country either, it was decided to run Summer Bible Camps for the children and youth in the areas where we have Churches and programmes. It seemed the ideal opportunity to do something for the young people when there is so little happening in the villages over the summer.

We started off in June with one youth camp in the village of Kotodesh, as that was all we had funding for at the time. However, we were delighted to receive a sizeable donation which allowed us to run camps in all of the villages where we work. The youth camps, for 14 – 18-year-olds, ran for 5 days, with the children’s camps for the younger ones running for 3 days. There was great excitement in the villages where there was an event taking place, and between 500 – 600 children and young people participated over all the different locations. They enjoyed a mixture of teaching, singing, dancing, games and team challenges over the days of the camps. 

We rounded off our month of camps with a Youth conference in Pogradec, the town where our ministry base is located. Between 170 – 180 young people came from the villages to meet together for this final day of teaching and fun challenges. 

We are very grateful to Child Evangelism Fellowship and The World Race team for partnering with our own Albania staff to deliver these camps – a very busy and exhausting month but so worth it to see all the young people happy and enjoying being together. Definitely something we will look at doing again in future years.

Have a look at our website if you would like more information on sponsoring one of these young people or supporting one of our projects: https://www.livingwateradoptachild.org/uk/.