YWAM Lebanon participated in the "Festival of Life" on the 26th of June at Lebanon’s Monument Park
The Festival of Live was put on by the Lebanon Pastors Prayer Network. Between 75,000 and 100,000 pounds of free groceries and health-care products are estimated to have been distributed at the event.
YWAM was one of many organisations to participate in the festival. Some of the other organisations included Youth for Christ, Teen Challenge, Career Link, YMCA, and many more.
The goal of the event was to minister to the “Whole Person” and to show the people Jesus and help with other areas of need.
You can read more about the festival and the YWAM Outreach here, and you can find out more about YWAM Lebanon here.
The YWAM Ship the s/y Next Wave has completed its recent refit.
During the refit the ship was placed in dry dock to enable the cleaning and repainting the hull, anchor and chains. They also did major work on the engine room, inspections on the generators, recertification of all safety devices and some very heavy duty cleaning jobs.
Not everything was completed and they are having to plan for a further more extensive refit period in the next year to finish items that were postponed and upgrades that had to be cancelled during this last refit.
Now that the refit of the vessel is complete the Marine Reach team has started on their evangelism tour of Sicily, Italy. They are currently hosting two DTS teams, one from Kings Lodge in the UK and the other from Quebec in Canada.
The Not for Sale Campaign is bringing the “Stop Paying for Slavery” tour to Australia this month. Here are the dates and location for the tour:
Adelaide June 29 and 30
Melbourne from July 1 – 3
Townsville July 4 – 6
Brisbane July 7 – 9
Canberra July 9 – 11
Wollongong July 12 – 13
Perth July 14 – 16
Newcastle July 17
Sydney July 18 – 19
The tour aims to bring together people from education, law enforcement, faith communities, corporations, consumers and justice seeks to help bring an end to modern day slavery.
At many of the locations the people from the Not for Sale Campaign will be partnering with the location Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Centre for the events. I know that in Townsville the event will be held at the YWAM Centre there, and that appears to be the case in many other centres around Australia.
YWAM Angola is looking at building a school in the nation. The area that they are looking at is so undeveloped the government has no plans to address basic needs in the area like literacy and primary education. YWAM has already started up three literacy groups in the area and will be working with the tribal leaders to develop the school. There has already been land set aside and they are now waiting for approval from the local authorities.
Funds have been raised for the building supplies needed for the school but there is still a need for a vehicle to transport the supplies to the location of the school. The materials need to be moved piece by piece from Huambo, where the YWAM Centre is located, to the region of Kamakoyo. After the school has been built the off-road vehicle will be used to transport outreach teams into the region.
You can read more and find out how to donate on the YWAM International web-site, here.
CNN had an interesting article about something called “Voluntourism”. Voluntourism is defined by Wikipedia as:
Volunteer travel, volunteer vacations or voluntourism is travel which includes volunteering for a charitable cause. In recent years, "bite-sized" volunteer vacations have grown in popularity. The types of volunteer vacations are diverse, from low-skill work cleaning up local wildlife areas to providing high-skill medical aid in a foreign country. Volunteer vacations participants are diverse but typically share a desire to “do something good” while also experiencing new places and challenges in locales they might not otherwise visit.
I find it kind of entertaining that they are saying that it is something that has started in recent years. YWAM has been involved in voluntourism almost since it’s inception 50-years ago and has been sending people to the ends of the earth to experience new cultures, undertake new challenges and tell others about God.
What they call voluntourism Youth With A Mission and the Church calls “Short Term Outreach”.
