Fifteen local residents volunteer at camp in Brazil

Over the past year, a number of fundraising events have taken place to help pay for two group service mission trips to Camp Victoria, Brazil, just outside Tres Ranchos. Camp Victoria is in the southern part of the state of Goiás in central Brazil sitting on a peninsula into Represa Emborcação, a reservoir created by the Emborcação Dam on the Paranaíba River which separates the state of Goiás from the state of Minas Gerais.

The most recent mission trip took 15 individuals to the camp after 31 hours of travel. Five of those hours were traveling from Brazil's national capital to the camp.

Most of the local volunteers were at the camp from Jan.4-20. The students who went down made arrangements with their school and did homework while there.

The trip cost more than $2,000 per person, with each having to pay at least $1,000 out of pocket. The fundraisers, such as fun runs and dinners, went a long ways to help members of the Colfax's First Baptist Church pay their way to the camp.

"We had so much support," said Tammy Lewis, a volunteer who went down as part of the group. Aside from paying for the trip, the volunteers had to get vaccines for yellow fever and a visa before they could leave.

Camp Victoria is similar to many camps found in the United States with classes, discussions and activities such as kayaking, canoeing and an obstacle course.

The volunteers who went down filled in a number of positions. While some were counselors or extra hands, others worked on construction projects or in the kitchens. The camp is in a rural area and getting big equipment to help with the construction projects is very expensive, so the volunteers who are there do the work by hand. Among other things, they built an out house and several benches.

The local group helped with three camps. The first was a week-long camp with children as young as four up to junior high age kids.

The second week had youths from about 8 years old to about 15.

Over the weekend they had an English camp where all the participants were in their late teens and early twenties and were practicing English language skills.

Some of the campers had a good handle on the English language, others were barely learning it, which made the interactions between the volunteers and the campers an enjoyable learning experience on both sides.

"You never realize how difficult it is to play a board game until you are trying to teach Clue to someone with limited English," Lewis said.

During the English camp, the campers are given an all-American diet, and while they enjoyed the hamburgers and hotdogs, they weren't happy to be missing out on one of their cultural staples of beans and rice for lunch.

Many of the campers were on scholarship to the camp and came from low income homes.

The culture, and by extension the campers, didn't have a curfew and many of their activities kept them up until midnight; such as hunts, night games and even pillow fights.

"It's very different from a cultural perspective," said Lewis.

While the campers were given good safety equipment, they didn't have to fill out any excessive liability forms.

"They weren't stupid," said Melissa May, who expressed her appreciation for the lack of stress she witnessed in the youths.

May went on to note how much easier connecting with the campers was without cell phones.

"They spent time with real life."

"For them, camp was a very special thing," Lewis commented.

Camp Victoria is in the middle of their summer season and is hot and humid. The flora and fauna are very different from anything the volunteers had experienced. Almost every morning they saw toucans, several beautiful macaws and once even monkeys.

At one point the volunteers got a scare when someone almost stepped on a snake that was leaving a classroom. They later discovered that it wasn't a venomous species of snake, but they had to turn it over to make that discovery.

A more common animal for them to find were tarantulas. May had several run-ins with the large arachnids. The tarantulas did take her by surprise on a number of occasions, though they weren't as frightening as she thought they'd be and seemed to be a complete non-event to the locals.

Due to the humidity and heat, the Mays left their windows and doors open when they slept to allow for a cross breeze, leaving plenty of opportunity for the spiders to enter as they sought out water.

They reminded May more of a crab than a type of spider with their size and and sound of their walking across wood surfaces. At one point she even took time to pet one as it was being released.

"It was so cool! In a lot of ways it was a whole different world," said May.