Pre-Summer
Your student will periodically receive emails called the “Royal Servants Presummer…” We include practical and spiritual insights for your student as they prepare for a life-impacting summer with Royal Servants. We encourage you to take a look.
Arrival
Royal Servants procedure is to require every student who is under 18 years of age or a graduating senior to call home before boarding the shuttle bus to our meeting place at the church. However, every once in a while, we may be running late due to flight delays, and calls home from the airport may not be possible. In this case, your son or daughter will either call you from the church, or just after they arrive at Training Camp.
Training Camp
We strongly suggest that you allow your student to go through the Training Camp experience without a phone call from you, outside of an emergency. We are in a camp setting, have limited phone facilities and are on a fast, tight schedule.
If an emergency occurs on our end with your son/daughter, the Trip Leader will contact you as soon as is physically possible.
Mail: Mail is much more important than many parents or relatives realize. Care packages are a great way to show your son or daughter you are thinking of them while they are at Training Camp. Contents of care packages can include favorite candy, chips, snack, etc. Try not to send large items. Students have limited room in their packs, as well as a weight allowance. Care packages are a great, low-cost way for relatives or friends from the youth group to bless and encourage your son or daughter. Make sure you send any letter or package in time! Training Camp tear down begins on early on the morning of July 1, 2012 and anything that arrives that day or afterwards will be returned by the post office.
Email: We will allow students to receive emails at Training Camp. However, they will not be able to send email. This service will be extended to immediate family members only (mom, dad, siblings and grandparents). Royal Servants will provide email instructions closer to the summer.
Overseas
Once students arrive at their final destination, they are given an opportunity and are encouraged to call or email home. However, sometimes it is simply too hard for students to get a call to go through, and even emails often fail to make it home. If you don’t hear from your son or daughter in a timely fashion, we encourage you to call Reign Ministries’ headquarters. Our office support staff will get in touch with the Trip Leader, who will then make sure you have a chance to connect with your son or daughter.
We will certainly be encouraging your son/daughter to be in communication with you in whatever ways are best, considering the unique circumstances of the country they are in. There are three forms of communication while overseas: mail, email, and phone.
Mail: “Mail call” is often a favorite time of the day. We see the emotional ups or downs depending on whether a student receives a letter or not. So we strongly encourage you to do whatever possible to be in touch with your student by mail. One point to note, however, is that we cannot guarantee that letters, and especially packages, will get to their intended destination. Letters usually arrive, but packages often never arrive at all. So we are asking that you do not send packages to your student overseas, only letters or cards.
The mailing address(es), when available, for your student will be in the itinerary we will send to you before the summer begins.
Email: Though it is generally available, we cannot guarantee that email will be possible. EuroQuest trips experience the most problems, since there are few Internet cafes in Europe, as well as the fact that they are frequently on the road. Many third-world countries experience frequent issues with their communications systems, and China often filters incoming and outgoing mail. Make sure your student has your email address before they leave home!
Important: A Trip Leader may choose to limit a team’s access to the Internet and email. With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, we have found many students spending a majority of their free time, not emailing mom and dad, but catching up with all of their friends at home. This is not necessarily bad, except when they spend time on the Internet instead of devoting time contacting home, working on memorization, doing laundry, or simply hanging out with friends! Even a student with the best intentions can get distracted and become homesick when they have too much access to life at home. They then start to “go home” emotionally and begin to lose focus on why they are on the field; their attitude suffers and instead of finishing well, they conclude the project half-heartedly.
Putting the Internet on hiatus will only be done if the Trip Leader feels that it has become a distraction and is negatively affecting the team.
Phone Cards: Some teams may have access to telephones, while other teams may not. And even if available, phone calls may not be the best method of communication. If you do choose to buy a phone card, be sure to purchase a major-brand phone card such as AT&T or MCI (Sprint no longer works overseas). Off-brand phone cards often don’t work, regardless of their advertising. Minutes go fast on international calls, so you may want to talk to your son or daughter and establish calling guidelines. They may be tempted to use the card to call friends and blow through the precious minutes. Also, do thorough research to get “overseas access codes” and dialing instructions for the country(ies) your student will be in before Training Camp so that your student will not get overseas and find out they are unable to use the card. (Phone cards will not work in Nepal, India, and Sierra Leone).
Note: Phone cards work well while traveling in the US in place of cell phones (to call from airports, etc).
Post Summer
After the summer, your student will receive letters from us helping them continue to debrief their experience and encourage them. They will, however, likely continue communication with some members of their team through emails, letters, and phone calls for months and even years after their trip!
Weekly Team Updates
Once Training Camp starts, Royal Servants sends out twice-weekly team updates via email and continue to do so throughout the entire summer. Once the teams arrive at their international destination, they will be written from the perspective of the trip leader and/or the leadership team. This is a great way to know what is happening on the team from the leadership’s perspective. You, and any family member or supporter, can sign up for the email updates on Reign Ministries website, reignministries.org/e-news.
No Cell Phone Policy
Royal Servants has a no-use cell phone policy on all of the mission trips, either in the U.S. or overseas. Your son/daughter can bring their phone with them to make calls during travel to and from the mission trip; however, we will ask that they surrender the phone’s battery upon check-in at the beginning of the summer. They will get the battery for the day the team is departing overseas so they can call home. This will give you one last chance to talk with your student before the international portion of their ministry. The battery will be returned at the end of the mission trip, on the day of departure to the states.
If the phone does not have a removable battery (IPhone), we cannot bring it on the mission trip and will have to send it home from Training Camp. In this case, we suggest that your student get a phone card so that they can make a call from a public phone (see Phone Cards above).
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