Greece Missions trip summary (Finally)

Hello everyone :)

Hope you’ve all having a good summer.

Me and Ben have had an eventful summer with leading youth camps and kids clubs, but the most exciting thing that happened this summer was our mission trip to Greece. Our missions trip was for 2weeks to Paros, Greece with UCCF. This is a very late reply, so apologies, but here is an update on how it went.

Going to Greece was a very exciting opportunity. It was mine and Ben’s first overseas missions trip and actually the first time for most of the team and our team leader (as a team leader). We met everyone in Athens at the home of the Clarks (a family of 5 who have been in Athens working with the IFES movement with UCCF for 2 years). Spent 2 days there learning about Greek culture and history, some useful phrases and getting used to the fact that you can’t put toilet paper down the toilet!!

During the 10 days that we spent on Paros, most followed this rough format…

Morning – team bible studies, indepth look at a passage, discussion time and prayer time.

Lunch out – tried stuffed vine leaves, moussaka and calamari. Their kebabs; “gyros”, was so good. A kebab in England is just not the same!

Afternoon – we found that it in the afternoon because of the heat, there weren’t many people around the town… so we followed suit and had beach time. We swam in the sea everyday with “intentional” volleyball playing, inviting people to play with us. We tried the embarrassing,’ Oops we hit the ball too far, can u pass our ball back?! O hey do u want to play with us?’ – didn’t work! (not sure why, i think our amazing volleyball skills intimidated them!

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Dinner – sandwiches made from supermarket groceries. A lot of apricot jam, philadelphia, marmite, chocolate spread, salami, cheese, cucumber & tomato sandwiches! We used our communal dining area at the campsite more than once to meet some new people and offer hospitality.

Evening – This was the time where most people were out on the streets. This is where we would meet strangers on the street and get into conversations with them on their views on God. We had a questionnaire that we used and we also brought solarium (evangelism tool using visual photographs) which was helpful.

Night – Chilling out at the campsite, playing cards with people around and playing games. Dutch Blitz anyone?

First night of talking to strangers, me and Ben got talking to a traveller from New Zealand that offered us a drink on his roof. As we sat on his roof drinking beer, I did think of escape plans if he turned out to be a psycho, but we had some interesting conversations about religion. He was very much interested and respected what we believed and asked many questions. God really blessed us with such a cool experience (with the first person we talked to!) for our first attempt, as we both felt quite nervous.

Other nights we went around with different members of the group. Had many rejections, some short answers to questions, some interesting debates and some deep conversations.

We also made signs to greet people at the busy port. 1 sign with ‘FREE HELP – help with directions and luggage.’ and another with ’30mins can change your life.’ – we thought maybe girls shouldn’t hold that one.

The most successful place was actually the campsite at night. Lots of people around and had more opportunities to spend more time with them in a relaxed atmosphere. A lot of the people around spoke english and were more than happy to talk.

Thank you everyone for your support, for your prayers and for the financial help. :) It was a great experience, where we learnt so much and saw God working in practical ways.

See you in September when we are back in Birmingham!