The Arteaga Family: CSO Retreat

Thank you for praying for our CSO retreat this past weekend with our high school group. We had 100% attendance and it was a great time to get to know our new group for this year. We enjoy quite a multi-cultural group that includes Koreans, Ecuadorians and some North Americans. For some English and Spanish are a second or third language.

All of the students came with a heart to learn and to serve. God used the devotionals to speak to all of us about our commitment to "Tell the Story" of the Good News of Jesus Christ this year to the Kids Club and Moms Club. We spent time working together to plan for our groups this coming year - the Bible Stories (based on a series on Experiencing the Life of Christ), the memory verses (this year we're going to memorize Matthew 5:1 - 12, The Beatitudes), and the crafts. The students who will help with the mom's club also met together.

And there was lots of fun and laughter too - special "skits" with unusual props, our traditional game of "I have never . . . ", team building activities and time to just hang out! We are grateful for such a great group of students to work with this year. And we appreciate our adult leadership team who puts in many hours helping to prepare for the Kids Club.

Pray for our group this year. There are some students who do not know Christ as their personal Savior. Our prayer is that through the time in the Kids Club they would come to have a relationship with Him.

We had our first club this past Wednesday. Attendance was a bit low due to a rainstorm that passed through Quito during the same time as the Kids Club, but we still enjoyed re-connected with the children and moms who did come.

Here are some photos from the retreat:

Our whole group at the Papallacta Guest House

A puzzle piece made by one of our students during team-building time (we need all the pieces of the puzzle to work together). I really appreciated the poem that he wrote - it sums up our Wednesday afternoons at the dump so well!