By Ireland Castillo
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While some students traveled abroad, others retreated to the semiannual Fellowship Camp at Malaekahana Beach Park from March 15 to 17, spending three days together with 60 campers.
“Fellowship Camp is just a place to, number one, have fun. It’s (also a) place to learn more about who Jesus Christ is (and to) learn more about the Christian faith. It’s basically an outreach program to help kids,” said Junior Chase Yamamoto.
Fellowship Club hosts its semiannual camp as part of its goal to spread the message of Christianity, not only to club members, but to all students. At each camp, the students are divided into two groups, and from then on the groups compete against each other in several team bonding activities. “The games that we have are pretty interesting, kind of weird (because) its (kind of) different games like for one of them you have to carry one of the team members and scream out a song like ‘A Whole New World’ or something like that as you’re running across the field to get them back and everybody in the team has to sing,” said President Senior Rachel Reichard. Junior Lauren Padilla added, “Usually it gets pretty dirty with a lot of food and, you know, running around covered in flour and ketchup and we’re racing on the beach.”
With all activities aside, the camp featured both worship and speaker sessions that were hosted by local pastors and youth leaders such as David Tamaoka and Ray Palompo from the Community Bible Church of Vallejo. “(We had) worship where we all (came) together and just sing, we all just sing about (Jesus Christ),” said Yamamoto, “We (also) have messages where pastors from around the island like to come down to give a speech, just talk to us about the Bible and just preach to us.”
By the end of the camp, new memories and new friends were made. “I think my favorite part of camp is there’s just this sense of community and realism that everybody has, like everyone has to be real with each other and there’s just this great community that you can’t really find when you just walk around school with these people,” explained Reichard, “I just love the fact that everybody loves to get really close with each other and just to know each other on a different level than just ‘Hey, you’re my friend from school,’ kind of thing.”
Though this marked the last camp of the year, Fellowship Club will continue to hold Bible services every Tuesday and Thursday and worship services every other week.
