YX Group 2

In the summer camp at YX, the 150 local high school students are divided into 10 groups. There are 14 kids in our group, mostly in grade 10 at local high schools, and 5 leaders (from Hong Kong, USA and Wuhan). Most of the YX kids are farmers’ children who have never been outside Hubei.

The kids have a good vocabulary but are poor in listening and speaking. Most have very little access to computers and the Internet. At the 5000-student school that hosts our camp, there is one computer room with 30 computers, and a computer each in several of the classrooms for the teachers’ use – connected through a local area network to the Internet. Most kids do not have computers at home, and only a few can afford to go to Internet cafes. Generally their exposure to computers is very limited. A typical student’s lunch costs 2-3 HK dollars, and one years’ school fee is ~600. So when they hear that our digital cameras cost 2000-3000 dollars each, it seems impossible to them.

God is never mentioned in any of the formal activities. But the themes of the songs, English lessons, video making, and performances are all around love, peace, joy, friendship, trust, kindness, perseverance, self-control, etc. And a typical question from the kids is “why do you come to YX?” So it is easy to steer the dialogue into faith and personal testimonies. In my small group of 5 kids, 2 of them were ready to believe in Jesus and prayed the believers’ prayer with me at the end.