By Jeff Brumley
Iraqi-born teen Alfarouk Majid passed through a shower of confetti, glitter and applause to accept the “PASSPORT Camper for Life” certificate he received to mark his being the organization’s 100,000th camper.
“The crowd cheered as we gave this young man free camp for life,” Colleen Burroughs, Passport co-founder and vice-president, said in a Sept. 16 news release. “It was a lot to take in — balloons, lights, cameras. He was speechless.”
Majid, 16, had come to the United States with his father and brother from Iraq by way of Syria. The family operates a restaurant in Pendleton, S.C., where he was first invited to camp by youth from First Baptist Church there, Passport leaders said in the news release.
Majid was attending the PASSPORTmissions camp in Danville, Va., at the end of the summer when the organization identified him as its 100,000th camper.
“PASSPORTmissions is the classic camp model that we started with in 1993,” David Burroughs, founder and president, said in the news release.
“Combining youth camp with a mission trip was revolutionary two decades ago,” he said.
To find the camper to represent that milestone, he added, “we literally dropped a pin on the map of the churches that were coming that week, and it landed on South Carolina.”