Each year Mission:Wolf hosts two or three international work camps. These camps are organized by Service Civil International / International Voluntary Services (SCI/IVS) around the world as a means of promoting global peace and understanding.

Our job as a host is to provide local transportation, food, shelter and a project with tools, materials and leadership. The international campers' job is to provide their own transportation to the local bus depot in Walsenburg and to come equipped with tent, sleeping bag and warm clothes. In the back of our trucks every summer, we haul several road weary travelers up the dirt road to M:W.

For three weeks a dozen individuals led by a M:W staff volunteer tackle tremendous jobs including wolf enclosure expansions, feeding wolves, building cabins, cutting firewood, improving visitor paths and other refuge projects. In the process hundreds of M:W visitors and staff become intertwined as language barriers transform into comical charades. At the end of three weeks working and eating as a community, a family emerges full of pride at the amazing accomplishments that can be made by a small group of individuals.

2002 marks our twelfth year hosting SCI/IVS Camps. International participants in past camps range from a 13-year-old girl from Austria to a 63-year-old grandmother from Germany. Over two hundred individuals have become a part of a huge extended family that stretches worldwide. Each summer for nine weeks visitors will find M:W buzzing with unique accents and friendly people from many far places.

M:W has provided a day of work from each camp to support community projects in both Custer and Huerfano Counties. Projects include helping to construct and maintain a local food store/co-op, raising poles for a neighbor's barn and installing road signs for our local homeowners' association. We also expose each group to the beauty of hiking in the Great Sand Dunes National Monument and the romance of the American Cowboy at local rodeos.

The staff of M:W looks forward to meeting the new international volunteers this summer and offers a huge thank you to all the individuals that continue to make this project a success.