InterVarsity Christian Fellowship focuses on U.S. college campuses, but U.S. college students are focused on the entire world.
Last summer more than 700 college students volunteered to participate in 60 InterVarsity staff-led summer projects from Xian, China, to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
As the sun rose on a frosty Rocky Mountain morning in October, leaders of InterVarsity Global Projects gathered at Bear Trap Ranch for their annual debriefing.
The reports given by the Global Project directors showed that the summer had given student participants an incredible range of experiences in far-flung locations, including:
• volunteering at an AIDS hospice in a Buddhist Temple in Thailand
• removing debris that clogged a smelly sewage ditch in Kenya
• presenting the JESUS film in remote African villages
• helping businesses involved in micro enterprise projects in Calcutta
• visiting inhabitants of a leprosarium in Manila
• assisting Salvation Army workers with flood relief in Bangladesh
• using accounting skills to help a ministry catch up on its bookwork in Ethiopia
In some areas, students found people eager to talk about the Bible and spiritual issues; in other areas it was difficult to have such conversations. Members of a number of groups were surprised to find people who wanted to discuss the spiritual symbolism of their dreams.
Plans and reservations are already being finalized for Global Projects in the summer of 2005. More information is available on the Global Projects website.
Global Projects director Scott Bessenecker says, “InterVarsity students have things to give to the world and things to learn from the world. Global Projects are a great way to help them figure out how to walk out both things well.”
Bear Trap Ranch is one of four InterVarsity Training Centers. It’s located at 9100 feet elevation just outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado. At Toah Nipi, the InterVarsity Camp in New Hampshire, Christian graduate students from the Boston area held a fall retreat that was written up in the Harvard Business School HARBUS.
