. . . . and that was where you would have found me this afternoon - hanging out with a great group of high school students who do almost the entire club by themselves . . . . we start with lining the kids up outside the dump, walking into the Extreme Response day care center together (which is where we hold our Kids Club now - a huge improvement from years past when we held it in a run-down, rat-infested building). The children work on "activity sheets" once they are seated at the tables - these sheets are anything from practicing the English word green, to matching things or whatever. It gives them a chance to settle down a bit while we get things going for the club.
Then the students jump right in with songs, a Bible story (we just finished up the series on how Jesus healed the paralytic with the high school students acting out the story), memory verses (the children just finished memorizing Psalms 23 - today we started Mark 10:38), and a craft and coloring page.
As the children leave the club, they receive a cheese sandwich!
Oh, and I forgot to mention that our high school comes from Alliance Academy here in Quito. And we have quite a mix of nationalities - students from the US, Korea and Ecuador. It's fun to watch them all interact! We are also seeing the students grow in leading the songs, memory verses, etc. . . . a great thing to see!
Every Wednesday is definitely a pick-me-up as it's great to get out of the house, and doing something for others. Most of the children who come to the club, live around the Quito dump and their families are somehow involved in the "recycling" process - digging through trash looking for things to be sold for recycling (they also look for food and things that they can use for their huts/homes). Today, I was enjoying watching Ana and Karla - they are sisters who have come from the very beginning (probably 5 years now) and we have known them for a while now. Ana was just a baby when she started coming and Karla (not very big herself) would bring Ana on her back. They now have a little brother that they bring with them - his name is Nixon. He's two! Last week, I asked Ana where they are living now and she said we're hiding in a place down the hill and we have no electricity or water . . . we never know the difference we are going to make in these little ones' lives.
Ana is the girl on the right, in the purple striped shirt, in the first photo above.
Thanks for praying for us on Wednesday afternoons! To see more photos of the Kids Club, please click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment