Camp Babochka
By Blake Purcell
We just got back Sunday evening from Camp Babochka for severely handicapped kids and their parents. Lewis, our 20 year old son, again was co-coordinator of the whole show, and show it was. Cathy and I were the King and Queen of Hearts in the Alice in Wonderland theme camp. We acted in the first skit in costume, with Laura, our 14 year old, as a fighting mouse. Zach, our high school senior, in the last skit was Cnegurichka, the Snow Princess, who danced and fought with Ded Moroz, the Russian Santa Clause. He looked great in a skirt and shawl! Ded Moroz was a little young lady.
The parents of 9 kids came so Cathy and I hosted them, and through this camp they are beginning to not only relate to each other and help each other outside of the camp, but to be much more open to the Gospel and the teaching than they were 2 years ago when we were with them. Also, about 2x more parents are now involved than before, almost all of them unbelievers. I got to share a Christmas message with them Saturday night at 11 PM at our "cafe". Cathy backed about 10 pound cakes and made chocolate fondue for all the snack times.
What a blessing to see the kids so joyful to be loved to enthusiastically and to be singing wonderful Christmas songs, whether they can speak intelligibly or not. About 1/2 cannot speak clearly. All of them can show that they like things though. The most profoundly handicapped, Sergei, cannot speak at all, or control anything but his eyes, but he was weeping when it was all over. I was one of the biggest men at the place so I had the privilege of picking the bigger handicapped campers up, all young men now, some 19 years old and putting them in their seats on the bus, and carrying them off. A very moving experience.
The one Christian mother in the program, whose son David was operated on a few years ago in Dallas, Texas, tell me that 2 years ago when she looked around the camp and saw Lewis, John Mark, Zachary, and me standing around the outside edges of the group to see if anyone needed help during the meetings, she felt that the camp would not exist without "the Purcell men being the stalbi (pillars) of the camp". God is good and I am very proud of my wife and kids for serving the Lord so zealously with these wonderful folks.
Cathy and I were also greatly encouraged by remembering that Anya, the founder of the camp, came to the Lord through our Nav ministry in 1997, thought we barely knew her, and one of our Nav disciples, Vadim Shevchenko, and his wife Tanya, who came to help at the camp with their 2 young kids. What an blessing to be with a family who is so faithful in the Lord, and a wonderful father that came to Christ in our ministry in 1992.
