DAVIS — One of the major activities campers can participate in at Falls Creek Youth Camps are the mission stops. Held each day in the Mission Outpost area, missions stops give campers opportunities to learn more about state-wide and global missions and also opportunities to help various ministries.

One of the ministries featured this year at Falls Creek is Oklahoma Baptist Disaster Relief (DR). During crisis response, DR teams hand out first contact bags for individuals who have been impacted by storms or other natural disasters. Students at Falls Creek had the opportunity to pack these bags for DR teams to hand out as a hands-on mission project.

For the first four weeks of camp, the bags packed contained toiletries such as shampoo, razors, shaving cream, toothbrushes, toothpaste and more. Bags packed in the last four weeks of camp will contain other supplies such as notepads, pens, antibiotic cream, coloring books and colored pencils.

“Each week the goal is for the students to pack 1,000 bags so by summer’s end we would have 4,000 of each type of bag to use as we respond to disasters here in Oklahoma and around the nation,” said Jason Yarbrough, Oklahoma DR director.

Last year was the first year this mission project was held. Students responded positively, packing almost 12,000 of the toiletry bags. These were used in the numerous DR responses not only in Oklahoma, but also Iowa, New Mexico, South Carolina and Louisiana. Recently, Oklahoma DR teams that are responding to the flooding in Texas have taken some of the first contact bags to distribute while ministering to homeowners.

A new ministry of Oklahoma DR is the Box Ministry, where DR gives boxes, tape and packing paper to homeowners whose homes were impacted by storms. The hope is that by giving these packing supplies to homeowners they will have a means to store anything they are able to save after the storm.

As another part of the Falls Creek hands-on mission project, DR asked campers to write messages of hope and encouragement on packing paper. This is so that when homeowners go to wrap something up using paper from the Box Ministry, they will see those messages of hope written by the students.