IDAHO: Grace Church's summer camp is a family affair
Episcopal News Service. August 18, 2010 [081810-01]
Pat McCaughan
Rock-climbing, canoeing, hiking, and swimming at the Episcopal Diocese of Idaho's Paradise Point this year was a first-ever summer camp experience for Marisol Muñoz, 14 -- and also for her extended family.
'Camp Oropeza' was also a first-time bilingual, multicultural, multigenerational camping effort for Grace Church, Nampa, aiming to boost community between its Spanish- and English-speaking parishioners, said the Rev. Karen Hunter, vicar.
"We designed the camp to be a place where English- and Spanish-speaking folks from the community could spend quality time together," she said.
Although initial plans were for a children's camp with adult facilitators, "it became apparent that in order to make it work we needed to invite Latino families. We came to understand that culturally, it's just not something many Latino families do, send their children off to camp.
"That's when we came up with a plan of inviting the entire families," Hunter said during a recent telephone interview from her Nampa office.
It worked. Extended families attended -- including "young mothers with babies and toddlers who couldn't have gone to camp if we hadn't included the entire family," Hunter said.
"It was a fantastic success," added Hunter. "We have a sense of ourselves as a unit and as a church," she said of the two congregations.
"We wanted to go and have fun for a while," Muñoz said in a telephone interview from her Farmway Village home, about 15 miles from Nampa. "We never went somewhere like that for fun and we wanted to get out for a little bit and have fun."
Farmway Village is a former migrant labor camp that has morphed into a low-income facility housing about 2,000 mostly Hispanic residents, said the Rev. Debbie Graham, who leads Sunday Spanish-language services at the village community center.
Although it is located near Caldwell, a city of about 40,000, Farmway Village residents are largely isolated in the primarily agricultural Canyon County community. That isolation prompted Grace Church to reach out to the community in a new way, Hunter said.
"There used to be a bus that went between the two places but two years ago, we found out that the bus service was either interrupted or cancelled," she recalled.
"It gave us an opportunity to just go there for church rather than trying to get people to come to Grace for church," she said. "On Palm Sunday a year ago we had our first service there and from that a small community who worships regularly there has emerged."
Initially, the Rev. Ezekiel Oropeza, the first Latino ordained a priest in the Idaho diocese, developed the ministry. He died suddenly in July; the summer camp was named in honor of his ministry, Hunter said.
About 37 members of both congregations participated in the camp, which was held July 26-29 at Paradise Point, a diocesan ministry celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.
Located on Payette Lake, the camp season extends from May through October and includes weekend and daily camping experiences for youth and adults.
In addition to outdoor activities, campers worshipped daily, studied Scripture and focused on spiritual journeying together. The camp was funded through a grant from the domestic missionary project and offered something for everyone, Hunter said.
Opening up the camp to entire families has given rise to new ministries, including equipping a nursery for next year's camp, partnering with a preschool, offering English as Second Language classes and hopefully enlisting nursing students to offer health and nutrition and other courses.
A youth program is also being developed, "to offer strong role models and more of life outside Farmway Village and poverty," Graham said. The goal is to demonstrate "that you can dream and become what you want to be. I'm so excited about this, to give an opportunity to become all God created them to be."
It aims "to overcome the reality of racism and the sad history that at least in some parts of Idaho, if you're Mexican you're considered less than, or not as good as," she added.
It hopes to continue the success of Camp Oropeza, "for the youth to be in a community where you're accepted by everybody. It has empowered them so much, to know that God loves everybody, and that people of different cultures and languages can truly create community together. We are learning you can have a multilingual, multicultural community that works together, worships together, plays together -- it's an incredible experience."
An Aug. 15 follow-up picnic has already helped reinforce "the ministry of Camp Oropeza," Graham added. Beyond "the mountaintop experience of camp, you come back to the valley and day-to-day life. We hope to help them apply what they learned at camp and to build on that in their spiritual journey and making their lives better for one another."
Marisol Muñoz said Camp Oropeza was a life-changing experience "for me, my mom, my two little sisters, my two little brothers, my daughter, my grandma and her kid and another aunt of mine with kids."
"We had a lot of fun; the praying part was nice. We hope to go back next year. They had activities in each age group. Each of us was in our own and [we] made a lot of friends. Everyone there was really appreciative and nice."