Camp Elim - Background and History

    Camp Elim ministries has been in operation for 17 years. The school, pre-kindergarten through 6th grade, currently has about 225 students, with 10 teachers. Summer camps also draw many young people each year, with an average of 120 campers each week. There have been as many as 192 young people attending at one time.
    Camp Elim is situated on 16 acres on the southwest coast of Haiti. It is only about 120 miles west of the capital city of Port-au-Prince, but due to bad roads, the trip takes about 5-6 hours by truck.
The compound includes a school with 8 classrooms, a dining hall, an open pavilion for church services, and sleeping accommodations for 140 campers in the summer. There is also a large guesthouse, a parsonage, a workshop and storage building. We are presently remodeling an old chicken house and a bakery to be able to accommodate 30 more summer campers.
     Due to the large proportion of young people in this country, we were challenged to build another camp 65 miles north of Camp Elim near Jeremie. Fort Grand A’nse includes two schools, one in the mountains and another at a nearby church. We have hired 13 teachers for these two schools. There are also summer camps with nearly 130 coming each week.
    The facilities at Fort Grand A’nse include a meeting room for 200, which also doubles as a dining hall, four cabins, and an administration building (which also can sleep 14 campers if necessary).