Balloons, boatracing are avenues for outreach in first Adventist youth camporee in Bangladesh.
Just back from Bangladesh, Baraka Muganda, Seventh-day Adventist Church youth director, looks at his pictures on his computer screen. “Look at all these people, so many people, so many villages,” he says with enthusiasm, his Tanzanian accent echoing throughout the office.
He points to an image of Bangladesh villagers lining a river where Adventist youth are racing boats. Dozens of paddlers push up the river, their boats displaying Adventist health messages while youth leaders shout words of hope to the villagers.
“There are thousands of onlookers, we don’t know how they came from their villages,” says Muganda.
Boat racing was just one of the events of the first Adventist youth camporee in Bangladesh. Some 1,200 Pathfinders attended the event, held on the campus of Kellogg-Mookerjee Memorial Seminary in Jalirpar, Gaopalgonj, Nov. 19 to 24.
“We sometimes have to do things differently there,” says Muganda. “Traditional methods of outreach do not work.”
Pastor Gamalia Falia, camporee initiator, says the purpose of the camporee was “to challenge our youth to love the Lord. With God’s power in their daily lives, all things are possible,” said Falia.
Good News in the Air attracted hundreds of people from nearby villages and government officials who came to see the launching of 1,200 balloons—one balloon for each delegate. Every balloon had a message pasted on it.
“For us the balloon approach works well,” says Reuben Kisku, youth director for the church in Bangladesh. “The purpose of Good News in the Air was to allow us as a church, and as Pathfinders to proclaim our message to every community in Bangladesh.”
Siegfried Mayr, president of the Adventist Church in Bangladesh, said it was a privilege to hold biblical values before the Pathfinders. “That will make them young boys and girls who dare to be different by honoring God, their parents, teachers and fellow men, in building up the Bangladesh nation,” he says.
There are 23,000 Adventists in a population of nearly 135,000,000 in Bangladesh. Seventh-day Adventists first entered the country in 1919.
