Camping for the first time

There was a time in my life when I served as a missionary. I was a student at UNICAMP when I got in contact with the Campus Crusade for Christ. At that time its acronym was CCC, it seems that now they are known simply as Cru. I participated in their discipleship program, and as a disciple I had different mentors at different times. One of them wanted to do something cool with the disciples and invited us to go camping. We went to Parque Nacional do Itatiaia in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Fear of violence

I will be honest, I hadn’t done that before in my life, and didn’t do it again after. We have such incredible parks in Brazil. The nature is exuberant, and the lands are vast. However, camping isn’t something that Brazilians do a lot. And I know exactly why. It’s because of the fear of violence. Being in an open area with little to no security is worrying. You are vulnerable to anyone that might want to attack you, which concerns us.

It took a lot of convincing

I remember that I had those fears then, and I exposed them to my mentor. He was American, and he told me that he used to do that a lot in the US. He spent a lot of time convincing me that it was secure. Remember, we didn’t have internet then, so he showed me brochures, maps, travel guides. I was still afraid of going, but after many conversations, I ended up accepting.

In the end, it was fun

I will not say that I didn’t like, because I did. We had cool activities. First, we found a good place to mount the tents. Then we got water straight from the source. Also we cooked our food in little camping stoves. All of that was brand new to me. But when nighttime came, I couldn’t hear a sound, and even couldn’t see the stars because it was cloudy. Everything was extremely dark and quiet. I was still afraid that someone would come for us. Not like what we see in horror movies, that would be easy. But like the news that we saw everyday in the newspapers.

Luckily, nothing happened. I enjoy having had that experience. But I’m not sure that I would do it again.