Story and Photography by Russ Dilday


The roaring campfire among the tall fir trees gave Alin a warm feeling against the cool night air as he and his fellow campers sang about Jesus. He had just finished a toasted marshmallow and was licking the sticky remains of the treat from his thumb...

During a pause in the singing, he looked up at Laura Watson and smiled. It’s a memory of Camp Buckner – a camp for orphans in the hills of Romania – that will haunt Watson the rest of her life, she said. It’s also a reminder that she and other Romanian camp team members from Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth and Calvary Baptist Church in Tulia were doing their “job,” as many put it: Sharing Christ’s love with those who don’t often experience it.

“Alin is 10 years old and is a special needs child,” Watson, a member of Wedgwood, said. “He was not touched enough as a child, so he rocks constantly. Whenever we’re in a big group he just looks like he’s going to explode and my job was to hold him, tell him that I love him and that it’s okay.

“One night at the campfire he looked up at me with both eyes and he knew that I cared,” she recalled. “He had this look of pure joy and innocence, which the Romanian team says they don’t often have.”

Comparing the volunteer summer missions experience with work, Wedgwood member Jaudon Davis said her team’s “job” in working with Romanian orphans “was to show the love of Jesus Christ to these children.”

Summer camps like the one deep in central Romania and work with children in Russian and Romanian orphanages form a major part of the summer program for Buckner Orphan Care International.

Working in Romania through short-term volunteers from churches like Wedgwood, Calvary, and First Baptist Church of Lubbock, longer-term interns and with team members from Romania, Buckner summer camps provide children living in crowded, monotonous conditions with a camp experience away from orphanages.


Scars on his neck and chest mark the
hard life lived by Artum, one of the
temporary residents of Orphanage
No. 15, a street children's hospital
and assessment center in St. Petersburg.



Volunteers like Bonnie Glenn
of First Baptist Church, Longview,
helped children with crafts at the Russian camps.
Volunteers conducted Vacation Bible School-type programs featuring recreation, Bible teaching, crafts and lots of love for children often neglected in large orphanage settings.

“We have hugged them, spent free time with them,” said Davis, a pharmicist who made the trip with her husband, Mike. “We let them play with our hair and gave them hugs, lots of hugs.”

The hugs also were given during ministry trips to children’s and babies’ orphanages by team members prior to camp.

Wedgwood team member Tom August said the team’s goal at the orphanages was to “provide them with the opportunity to be loved, to be held, to be sung to, to be caressed. The children need this, the babies need that nurturing. As good a job as the caretakers do, there’s just not enough of them. They are so busy trying to provide for the physical needs of the child and not able to provide for the emotional and spiritual needs.

“The volunteers through Buckner are able to come into the orphanage and be able to spend some time just doing nothing more than praying over the children as they hold them,” said August, who is on his fourth trip through Buckner. “We had the opportunities to feed them, to sing to them songs that they otherwise won’t have a chance to hear. Babies obviously are too young to understand the gospel message, but we sang the songs that they are going to hear later on in life. As they become older children, they will hear the same songs and realize that the same people that loved them as babies are now giving the message about where that love comes from – our Father in Heaven.”

Sharing the Gospel in Russia

While teams in Romania were conducting summer camps, Buckner teams in Russia also were holding similar camps of their own. Buckner provides almost identical camps and support in Russia, where teams from First Baptist Church in Athens, First Baptist Church in Longview, First Baptist Church in Houston and Tallowood Baptist Church in Houston provided ministry this summer.

Pastor Kevin Hall of First Baptist Church of Haskell led a team of 22 that included members of First, Longview and individuals from churches in Cleburne, Dallas, Fort Worth, the Valley and Texarkana.

“Our assignment was to share the gospel through Vacation Bible School with the children in Orphanage No. 2 out of St. Petersburg,” he said. “It seemed to work. You can do some of the same things you can in America, using 30-minute stations where we had crafts, memory verse, story time and recreation. It’s very similar.

“The gospel translates in any language, but we needed to make sure that it would translate in a way that the kids would understand it,” he said, “and then we did games that would be more culturally sensitive to the Russian culture.

Hall said he was most rewarded during the trip when he observed adult team members “blossom: their eyes opening to the need, a need that’s larger than them, seeing outside themselves and their own comfort zones.”

Jane Ann Crowson of First, Longview was among those adults. “We shared the love of God through our physical love and through stories and Scripture. Everything was reinforced through the theme – the story was told and had the same Scripture that the memory verse station had and the same Scripture the craft reinforced.”

Like the Romanian camps, the Russian camps contained large doses of emotion as children who have known little love were buried in it.

“When we turned into the orphanage drive, we saw all these children just pushed up against the gate, holding their hands out wanting just to touch us, said Michelle Morgan of First, Longview. “A little boy ran up to me and raised his hand up like he wanted to be held, so I just held on to him and he clung to me. At that moment I was like, ‘God, I don’t know how I’m going to make it this week, but it’s only by Your power, because I can not love these children on my own.”

Departing camp was no less emotional, said Crowson. Like many on the team, she knew she “couldn’t take them with me,” but were comforted knowing “that God comes in and His love will never leave them, that even though parents leave them and people leave them and disappoint them, God’s love is constant, never changes, never leaves them. That’s the main thing.”