Praise & Worship

350 children seated so nicely.

Dental workshop - how to keep your teeth healthy!  

Our VBS team

While medical, dental, & vision teams spent the day in the villages for their clinics, we had a small group that went to the boarding school for VBS on Wed, Thur, Fri. Truly, the highlight of this trip. Three hundred fifty children singing their heart out, with God in their hearts truly brings tears to your eyes. These children have nothing, most of them only one parent, come from extreme poverty with barely a suitcase to their name yet the joy in their hearts shines brightly as if they have everything in the world. We have so much to be thankful for back in the states.

Doing crafts with 350 kids in one room was definitely one crazy experience. It was like being in a market with everyone screaming all at once....mass pandemonium.

Haven't had time to update as everyone's been working so hard.  We now have a dental group at our school servicing the 500 children, medical/dental team going out to the villages, and a vision (glasses) team going on their own (Micah age 12 and Sydney age 11 have been able to run the whole vision on their own fitting glasses for the villagers!) and finally two teams going out to the numerous baptisms (we had 20 on Tuesday and another 20 yesterday).  On top of all that, imagine doing a VBS program for 350 children with 4 days notice! However, seeing all 350 children singing their hearts out brought tears to our eyes and made it all worth while.  Even as our meeting attendance has grown each night our meetings haven't been without it's challenges and we ask for additional prayer as we were told yesterday that a group of thugs threatened to kill the pastor and beat up the team if we didn't stop doing the meetings (there's an election going on and one of the candidates is anti-Christian). We consulted the village elders and the villagers were adamant that we continue and said they would rally and "defend" us if that happened. I went last night to our meeting that received the threat and nothing happened but it was touching to know how much the villager were willing to stand up for us to continue the meetings.

Day1

       I woke up to a goat bleating and some (not so wonderful) Indian songs.  We changed up schedule because we got to India at 12 p.m. Our schedule was: Eat breakfast at 7:30 then we nap until 11:00, right at eleven our team would go visit the school.  Breakfast was, of course, Indian food (we didn’t bother to pay extra for American food).  At 11:00 we went to the school and the Indians basically made it a parade. They were throwing huge flowers at us and seemed so happy with god in their lives.  It was the greatest experience in my life. I asked if they liked their school and they said yes. After we were done browsing the school we went and talked about god in our tent. We told the story of Jonah, sang some songs, and of course, the seminar started.  By the time it was far too late so we had to leave to our hotel. It is now morning as I’m writing this so I’ll get to the next one A.S.A.P.

 

Day2

So I learned the hard way that Indians love driving crazy.  This is how they drive; you’re looking outside at the dry wasteland and you see a herd of water buffalo in the middle of the street. Suddenly, you hear honking of your own horn even though you past the herd.  I learned that you have to honk your horn to let people/cars know that you’re there. So the rest of the ride we would be honking every few seconds. We went to the village quite early and I met some friends and one enemy.  I called the enemy Brownie because of his brown shirt.  Brownie was very naughty and he stole 3 pieces of gum and one Poky pack.  I had to keep him away with my water squirter that’s supposed to be for when I get hot (I’m so mean!).  So I was glad when we left.  At night I thankfully went to a different village for health talk.  At that village I was doing Daniel and the lions’ den with my friend Christian.  I was king he was Daniel.  After that we went back to the hotel.