| Whassssup...
with your youth ministry? By Cindy Palumbo
Frostburg UMC Camp Hope is an acronym for Christian Appalachian Mountain Project Helping Other People Enthusiastically. Each year, church youth groups come to Allegany County to do repair work on elderly and low-income family homes. We repair about 50 houses each summer, with about 400 campers from 25 different churches participating. The youth groups raise the money to come to Camp Hope, furnish their home supplies, food, lodging, and programming. Many are amazed when they learn of some of the conditions our brothers and sisters in Allegany County are living in. We have elderly people living with no hot water, no heat and rotten plywood floors. We have people who have not been able to leave their homes because they have no wheelchair ramps. We have young teens living in bathrooms instead of bedrooms. We also have a lot of people who feel there is no one who cares about them. Camp Hope was able to fix a few of these problems last summer, as it has every summer for the past 24 years. Many of our homeowners feel society has given up on them and no one wants to touch them, hug them or love them. Our youth and campers come in and brighten their lives, inside and out. What a blessing to be a part of this program: to see the hope in a persons eyes when their home receives a facelift and their souls receive hope. We recruit churches and organizations to help feed our campers. Each evening a different church will feed about 100 very hungry workers. After dinner, we use their sanctuary for our vesper service. The application deadline for Camp Hope is in November. Currently, we are full and have churches on a waiting list to try to get in for this coming summer. For more information on how to bring your work team, contact me (Cindy Palumbo) at the Frostburg UMC, (301) 689-6626. Applications go out in October. Donations for supplies can be sent to Camp Hope, P.O. Box 420, Frostburg, MD. 21532. | 
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