KIVU Diary: My Trip to the Philippines

Diary Entry by Rebecka Kaltenbach, KIVU Gap Year Participant Camp KIVU is a Christian adventure camp in Colorado, USA where teenagers go to experience the great outdoors.  One of their programs, called KIVU Gap Year, reaches out to students taking a year off in between high school and college.  These students spend the year traveling to different locations around the globe, partnering with ministries in different countries.  ICM was privileged to host a group of ten participating in the KIVU Gap Year at two of our bases in the Philippines.  One of the participants, Rebecka Kaltenbach, shares her ICM experience below: “To see what ICM is doing to help all those children impacted me in ways I can’t even explain.  One memory that will stick with me forever was in El Nido.  I had been going to the preschools regularly to get stories of the children and visit their homes to meet their families.  I would see the kids every week and hangout for the day, so they got pretty comfortable with me.  One day I went to Marty’s House Learning Center and I am not going to lie, I was starting to feel the heat.  I was pretty exhausted.  But when the kids saw me they stopped what they were doing and all 23 of them ran over to me and swarmed me with a huge hug!  It is something that I will never forget; every time I think about it, it makes me miss what I was doing more than anything.  But it also gives me joy to think that I as able to experience that! The other thing that really stuck with me is the relationships I made with the ICM staff. Just being able to have fun fellowship with people that love the Lord and share a lot of the same interests was amazing. The last night the staff threw us a going away party and let me just say that I have never laughed so hard in my life. It was amazing and a highlight of my trip.  But over all, to see what God is doing in the lives of so many people through the ICM staff just blows my mind and I was more than blessed to be able to experience that for a few months.”