Ruth Sykes and Sue Knowles are short-term volunteers who are working in a church plant in a slum community called Vergeles, in Guayaquil, Ecuador. They write:
At the moment, it is the rainy season here and people are crippled by the mentality that everything must draw to a halt. Consequently, attendance at church meetings is variable and numbers are often quite low. However, we have really seen God at work lately amongst the children and young people in this community. We have regular contact with about 25 young people and were recently able to start a youth group in the church. Recently, we went on a four-day youth camp in Manglaralto, on the coast, with 150 other young people from different Baptist churches across the province of Guayas. Santiago, a young person from the church plant in Vergeles, came with us and had a life-changing experience.
The camp was a blurred haze of seminars, talks, worship sessions, games, trips to the beach and sleepless nights in crowded dorms. It was amazing to see young people from different Baptist churches across Guayas coming together to praise God. On the penultimate night, the speaker said that he knew that there were a number of people there at the camp who had been going to church for some time and were interested in Christianity, but had never actually taken the step to follow Christ. At that point, Santiago turned round and looked directly at us. “That’s me”, he said excitedly. At the speaker’s invitation, Santiago then joined several other young people in coming forward to give their lives to the Lord. Santiago had been quite negative at the beginning of the camp, but by the end of it he did not want to leave! The next time we saw him in Vergeles, he was like a different person. He was so full of joy and could not stop singing all the songs from the camp!