Day 16: Family Visits and Team Dinner

Today we gave the students the ability to go to visit families. In this culture, they treat Americans like royalty and the food continues from the second you arrive until the second you leave. You leave and do not have to eat another meal for the rest of the day because you feel so full. All our our students were invited to houses this year and got to experience the hospitality. Some got to hike in villages or walk around the village and all of us ate way too much. 

Ten of us went to our friend Marigona's house. She is one of the students who came to the US in the fall. Jeremy and I got to have her and Kadda over for dinner one night when they were there. It was an amazing experience. Her family was super sweet. Twenty-seven people live in her home and the cleaning and cooking start every day around 5:00 or 6:00 AM. We were blessed with the ability to meet her parents, grandmother, aunts, sister, and a few cousins. Our food consisted of pita, chicken noodle soup, liver soup, bread, salad, vegetables, snacks and brownies. During our time we ate, laughed, talked and sang for a few hours. 

We treated our team to a nice dinner at Hotel Solid. It has a little pathway to a beautiful view of Suhareke so we all went up there to take some pictures. Everyone enjoyed it, especially cooking the meat on the stones. They finished the night off with a dip in the pool at the hotel. 

After dinner, we headed back to Rozafa and had share/testimony time. I cannot even tell you how many AMAZING stories have come out of camp this year. Berat said it has been the best camp EVER. It was the first time for students to hear the good news as a whole. It has really impacted our students. Some have been able to have multiple one-on-one conversations and found multiple people of peace to which they have clung to. Some have gotten into excellent conversations with the students in their team about deep topics. We've loved hearing the stories and know more things will come even though "camp" is over. Then some people played a came of "shallow and deep" where they went around and gave compliments to each other, a shallow and a deep one. Our students smiled and were touched by the sweet things said about them. Others sat and chatted with each other until lights out time.