Dear coworkers in God’s Harvest Field,

Greetings from Pereira!

Anniversary Celebration
On June 1, 2014 the church here celebrated her anniversary – as we do every first of June. This year we were pleased to have the preacher from Ibagué with us –  Gerson Tocora. His wife Diana Paula, their daugher, son, a young woman from the church in Ibagué and her niece all came along with him. We had a great time of fellowship and he brought a good message for the church here. That morning we baptized Emanuel, the son of Mario and Luz Mery.  Afterwards we all celebrated with a special dinner and table games.

Anniversary Celebration – take 27
This year Sheri and I celebrated 27 years of marriage.  As she had a week off from her English teaching, we took the opportunity to take off a couple days and do a mini-tour of the coffee region.  Our road took us first down into Quindío where we spent the night at a hotel out of town, enjoying the view of the Southern Cross and the other stars; the sounds of crickets, frogs and birds instead of buses, trucks, cars and motorcycles and no particular time schedule to keep.  The next day we visited a botanical garden and butterfly nursery, drove through the back roads, cut across the valley of the Cauca river and up the eastern side of the western range of the Andes to Calima reservoir where we stayed the night at another out of town hotel where we could enjoy the sound of wind in the pines and a stream running not too far off.  The next day we headed home on another back road finally totaling up 565 km over which we only paid four tolls (usually there are MANY more tolls) and enjoyed some of the natural beauty of the country nearby.

Youth Camp
We work with an association of Christian Churches that cooperate in many ways on a national level. One of those ways has been through organizing camps for our youth and families.  However, it has been several years since the last “National Camp”, something that was remedied this year as the church in Medellin organized and hosted the camp to which the youth of all the churches were invited.  For many reasons we only had representatives of four or five of the congregations, but had 60 campers and 20 staff and support people for the three day weekend.  We were thrilled to see how well the local team organized and prepared things and we were very proud of the 9 kids we took from Pereira – in our opinion they were the best behaved of the mostly well behaved campers.  Thank you to Montrose Christian Church for the donation that enabled us to pay the van for the kids who went with us. 

Laura
Some of you may remember that a few years ago we had a young woman with us for a couple of months.  She is the oldest daughter of the first man the Lord used me to bring to Him here in Colombia.  Her younger sister (there are three of them) has been going through some rough times and asked her parents if she could come spend time with us.  She is only 13 and has been going through some rough stuff at school.  They called and we asked them to send her in time to go with us to camp.  We’re not sure at this point how long she will be with us, but are thankful for the opportunity to sow seeds of hope and faith in this young woman’s life.  One of our girls here took her under her wing at camp and “adopted” her as her “little sister”. 

Stephania
We took another young woman with us to camp whom we met the morning we left for camp.  Her mother is a friend of one of the women from church and they asked if she could go with us.  She is a cancer survivor, having overcome lukemia, who is now facing a tumor that has shown up recently.  At first she was quite reserved and shy but warmed up on the 9 hour trip to camp.  At first she didn’t fit in at camp as she comes from a very Roman Catholic background.  But over the weekend she fit in, cooperated and was recognized as “Camper Of The Year” by the combined staff – giving her a “scholarship” to the next youth camp. She and her mother came last Sunday and we hope to be able to continue to minister to them as they face the trials ahead.

Thank you!
Thank you all for making it possible for us to live and minister here in Pereira.  Thank you for making it possible for us to take our youth to camp.  Thank you for lifting us up before the Lord in prayer.  Thank you for praying with us for the church here in Pereira.

In Christ,

Paul and Sheri