Summer camps in Vietnam, Cat Đam and Hoa An

By Minh Tam, SDB and Tri Dung, SDB

Cat Đam, Vietnam, 25 July 2018 -- The purpose was how to help the young to live the biblical atmosphere, and to relive the stories in the Bible in real joyful life, Don Bosco Cat Dam organized the camp on July 25, 2018 for the young people with the theme “enjoy life”.

They began the special day at 7:00 am with the activity of gathering and dividing into different teams. After that they had a game of entering through the ghost house in order to officially enter to the camp. Then they continued with the game of “the merciful father” with the help of youth leaders.

All the young participants enjoyed very much the games of the camps, and then after playing games, they began a very interesting part of the day was cooking competition. In this cooking competition each participant tried to cooperate with each other so that they could cook different dishes as the organizers encouraged.

After lunch they had music competition with varied kinds like fashion show, public dancing, musical items. And then they had sports festival with different sport games like table football, table tennis, badmington, animal racing, or to jump rope…finally, in the afternoon they had team games in order to have chance to practice solidarity.

Before ended the day, one of the participants gave a thank you talk on behalf of all the partipants and then Fr. John Vianey Minh Tam, SDB the one in charge of the oratory also encouaraged all the young participants continued to enjoy life by knowing how to listen to others and how to discern between good things or bad things so that they always do the right things in their lives and try to live in happiness by avoiding sins.

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An experience about joy and happiness

HOA AN: “loving summer” this was the theme of this summer at Don Bosco Hoa An Oratory. In this summer, the young people not only experienced joyful time of playing, but also experienced a time of studying about how to live.

The organizers based the purpose on the experience of Valdocco Oratory: “Oratory should be the place of education and serving the young, the young should be educated to be matured in their lives by knowing how to use their free time. That’s why the parents were very happy to have their children participated in this summer oratory, in this summer the young really experienced family spirit and in this family they could share everything with each other.

From the beginning of June 2018 many young people came to register to the summer program, there were more than 220 young people from grade 1 to grade 9 came to attend these summer activities. These children were not only Catholics but they also belong to other religions and non religion families. Some of them participated in this program the fourth time, the second time or the first time.

When they came to this summer program they could have time to review their lessons they already studied last year. Besides, they also could have opportunity to learn other skills like music, live skills, or sports, and of course, they could have time to play together and to be train how to be friend with each other and to be good sons and daughters of Don Bosco.

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