Member Spotlight: Camp Opportunity

Camp Opportunity provides the ultimate opportunity for abused children: a chance to find healing through a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Even short of accepting Christ, those children from foster homes who attend the nondenominational camps held in eight states from June through August will at least be given love, and have some fun to boot.

State foster-care systems can provide physical protection and provision for children coming out of abusive situations, says Bill Batzli, a Samaritan Ministries member who is executive director of Camp Opportunity International, but government cannot provide for the spiritual well-being of an abused child.

“There’s a lot of healing that needs to be done,” Bill says.

That’s where the all-volunteer ministry comes in.

The week-long sessions for children 6 to 12 years old feature typical camp activities: swimming, canoeing, horseback riding, games, crafts, etc. But also included are things like puppet shows that tell a Biblical story and then allow campers to “talk through” the puppets, Bill says. There are devotions at every morning’s flag raising, meals, and in the cabins. Christian songs are sung around campfires. Lessons are based on annual themes, such as last year’s, “From Wooly Worms to Butterflies,” focusing on transformation of lives.

Key to the week is being able to assign a mentor to each child rather than have one counselor assigned to several campers. That mentor is “their friend, their buddy for the whole week.”

“These mentors are invited and chosen and selected based on their spiritual and emotional maturity and their willingness to serve these little children,” Bill says.

Many of the mentors work the rest of the year as school teachers, Bill says. That works well for two reasons: They’re usually available during the summer and they also have already had background checks.

The camps, each of which is independently organized and run, and mentors don’t promote any particular Christian doctrines, says Bill, who attends American Evangelical Lutheran Church in Prescott. “These are little children who don’t understand complex doctrine anyway. They just need to hear the story of Jesus and how much Jesus loves them and how much He can turn their lives around.

“It’s an incredible experience for that child to realize that even though they might go from one foster home to another foster home, and even though they’re taken away from their parents, and often taken away from their brothers and sisters and separated into homes, Jesus is with them. They can reach out to Him. It’s an unbelievably comforting feeling to them to realize they have somebody there who will never leave them.”

A mentor focuses on building a relationship and trust with a camper, enabling the adult to reach out to the child and say, “You know, you don’t have to be alone. Jesus can be there for you.”

“It isn’t wholesale witnessing,” Bill says. “You can’t just throw a bunch of stuff at the children and expect them to buy into Christ. It has to be a personal encounter with Jesus as led by the mentors at that moment in their lives when they open up, and that’s different for each child.”

Some of the children arrive with a “cold stare in their eyes” and leave with it, too, Bill says. “Sometimes, you can’t reach them.”

And yet, “it’s amazing to see some of the children and how they transform in just the space of a week of camp.”

In a brochure for the camp, Bill tells the story of one such camper named Kenny. Once, while trying to turn a class disruption into a learning opportunity, Bill asked Kenny whether that was “the way Jesus would want you to act.”

“Then, with all the inquisitive innocence of a 10-year-old, he asked earnestly, ‘Who’s Jesus?’”

Bill explained who Christ was “in very simple terms,” including how “He was crucified so we could be forgiven.” The conversation ended with Kenny asking how to pray to Jesus for his life to be “turned around.”

“Kenny continued some of his old behavior the rest of the camp,” Bill writes, “but every once in a while, his eyes would meet mine, and without speaking a word, we both revisited that day on the old path through the woods where Kenny’s life was turned around.”

Bill tells some heartbreaking stories of other children who have been at the camp, including a girl who had been sexually abused by her biological father, but was being returned to him because he had served his prison sentence. After making it possible for her to attend one camp after another throughout the summer to keep her protected, the girl finally had to return home. But she didn’t stay, and her frozen body was found a few months later on the streets of Kansas City.

Another little girl had no fingers on one hand. They had been amputated because they had been badly burned when her father, while on a drug binge, had held her hand over a gas burner. One boy had a crooked hand because it had been beaten on with a ball peen hammer by a parent and never properly set. Another little girl was in her home when her father shot and killed her mother, then turned the gun on himself.

“These children have a deep need and we have to do something to help them,” Bill says.

The camps, advertised through child and family services departments, are offered in the states of North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Missouri, Washington, California and Arizona, with two separate weeks of camp weeks each available in Arizona and Missouri. Foster families apply for the children to come to the camps, which accommodate as many kids as they can usually from within a 100-mile radius. About 250 children a year are able to attend nationally, with numbers of campers ranging from 12 to 30 per week.

The children who attend have mainly been taken away from their parents because of drug abuse situations, physical abuse or sexual abuse, or sometimes a combination. “Pretty much all of them have been emotionally abused,” Bill says.

Camp Opportunity was started 36 years ago by in North Carolina. Bill became aware of it in the 1980s when he was in the Kansas City area. After serving as a mentor at camps for several years, he was asked to direct some camps, then asked to be on the board of directors. He started camps in both Tennessee and Arizona.

“It’s my passion,” Bill says, then adds that his wife, Heather, shares that passion. The couple have been foster parents for four children, most recently a 2-year-old who was born with drugs in his system but is in the process of being returned to his biological mother.

“That’s devastating,” says Bill. The Batzlis have had the baby since birth.

Yet, they say, they’d do it again “in a heartbeat” despite the heartbreak.

“What you can give (through foster care) is more important than what is taken away,” Bill says. “Even though it’s very painful, that’s what loving children is about. We only have a stewardship over them for a short time. These children need good foster parents. It’s one way you can serve the Lord.”

If allowed by the foster parents, contact between campers and mentors sometimes continues. They write letters or send postcards and greeting cards, or even meet for lunch or ice cream.

“The children really respond to that, because it helps them remember all the memories of the camp,” says Bill.

Ultimately, Bill says, the program would like to establish a camp near every major city in America.

“The need is phenomenal,” he says.