Camp Grier Global Village

logo by Flori Pate Designs

Learn more about an initiative GCPC is supporting...

Through the Global Village and Training Center we learn and connect with our brothers and sisters around the world. We discover that God lives in all of us. We discover a sense of belonging and kinship and as a result of the experience we may choose to take on the work required to help others live lives of dignity, health, and achievement. The work of our hands and hearts joins us with others to make tomorrow better for all of God’s people.

Camp Grier Global Village is patterned after the global village located at the Calvin Center, a year-round Camp and Conference Center, operated as a ministry of the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, PC (U.S.A)

 The Camp Grier Global Village works with partners to help build  understanding  of the places and cultures of the world that are overwhelmed with unhealthy living conditions and limited resources and knowledge of how to improve adverse circumstances.  Being part of a Global Village begins simply as an experience that has the potential to plant seeds of opportunity and service.  Those who choose to immerse themselves in a Global Village experience can be taken to places never imagined and can be involved in life-changing work for others. 

 

Haitian Yard Garden

The Global Village experience provides participants with opportunities to build connections with organizations that share common visions for improvement of health and daily security around the globe. Common visions range from creating education opportunities, improved health care systems, safe drinking water practices, healthy human waste systems and sustainable agricultural and home building practices through appropriate technology. The Global Village experience focuses on educating and empowering people by helping increase awareness of world problems and by offering opportunities to solve problems. The attempt is to encourage individuals and groups to engage in problem solving, to multiply the work of others, and to become aware of our mutual dependence as global citizens.  We are not limited by our beliefs or status, and our faith teaches us to walk with others as vessels of God’s love and grace

By design the village is a constant work in progress—participants work in the garden, barter for their needs at an outdoor market, make bricks to build authentic global village housing, use scrap lumber and metal to build a refuge camp, construct their own accommodations and other basic facilities.

Campers and global volunteers learn through experience and education. The village provides a setting where campers and volunteers live for a brief time in much the same way as our friends in developing countries live.  Participants experience what it means to have limited access to clean water for consuming and bathing. They experience what it is like to have limited food supplies, challenging conditions for growing food, unhealthy and inefficient cooking facilities, absent or limited health care and educational opportunity, as well as minimal resources for secure shelter (refugee camp life). Participating and sharing in conversations about health and family issues in a variety of global settings are foundational activities in the Global Village experience.

Effective, low-cost, appropriate technology—as participants experience life as it might be in developing countries they also may have opportunities to learn about and discuss technologies that can be used to improve conditions for people who live in compromised situations.

 

Appropriate technologies in the Global Village experience may include:

•  ways of lifting and pumping water with a water ram pump, treadle pump and a simple hand pump
• clean, safe drinking water using clay ceramic filters and  a slow sand filters
• human waste composting toilets and their proper use
• improved wood-efficient stoves and rocket stoves
• brick oven
• ram earth building blocks
• yard gardens and agricultural projects in Haiti
• converting  agricultural waste to charcoal briquettes for cooking
• converting  agricultural waste to bio char for agricultural uses
• managing a garden compost system
• successful educational scholarship and small loan programs
• participate and share in conversations about health and family issues in a variety of global settings
• current efforts to reduce the high maternal and infant mortality rate

Audience:

• Camp Grier Campers—Young people will have the opportunity to experience the daily life and activities of people living in developing countries such as—Haiti, Guatemala and Malawi.  They will learn about the issues faced by people in those countries, as well as the possibilities of becoming involved, today or tomorrow, whether as a young person or as an adult.
• Guatemala Partnership Church members— will have the opportunity to learn in greater detail and through hands-on experience improvements that can be made through health projects so that the knowledge gained can be shared with other churches and collaborative relationships can be made.
• Mission Teams will have opportunities for hands-on training, team building and preparations for their mission trip.
• Casual Camp Grier Visitors—will have the opportunity to take walking tours of the Global Village and Training Center and to become better educated through interpretative materials that can be used on site and taken for later use.