Friday Highlights

(No internet last night, so here is our post from yesterday)

Today found us doing the Lord’s work at a local church in Bonnet where we held a Vacation Bible School for the young children in the area.  Bonnet is an impoverished rural community where many, if not all the children do not attend regular school. 

We started with a few pews filled with children, but once Evans our interpreter got the children singing and shouting joyfully we soon attracted a large crowd.  Pastor Josh opened by asking the children if they knew what important event was going to take place this coming week.  What a joy it was to have some of the children understand the significance of Holy Week. He shared the story of Pam Sunday with them after which time we had them making their own cut out palm fronds.  What happy chaos it was with glue, tongue depressors and paper fronds happening everywhere.  We had the children make a procession around the church chanting “alleluia” which was a lot of noisy fun.  We then made crowns with rhinestones, glitter glue and lots of blind faith not to totally redecorate the church with their sticky creations.  Because of the numbers we split the group into boys and girls and while one group was crafting we had another group playing games outside.  The rice sack races and the parachute games were an absolute hit.

We were able to feed most of the children with a nutritious peanut butter sandwich followed by a refreshing drink of Kool Aid after which time we sent them on their way with a small parting gift.

It was a gift to be able to serve this community and felt God’s love working among these young children.  We left with many wonderful memories of our special time together and a reasonably intact church.     

After lunch back at Hope House, we got to work on a couple of maintenance projects. One part of the team, led by Kennedy and her newly acquired power tool skills, worked on repairing the roof.  This entailed clearing overgrown mango trees and leaves, tightening down screws that had been raised due to hurricane winds, and sealing the rows and rows of screws.  The other part of the team worked on some wall repair and painting in one of the bedrooms. 

Tomorrow we head out in the morning for the Little Children of Jesus Orphanage.  Looking forward to another great day!

Cheers,

Barbara