Our family is growing!!!

Neal and I are excited to share that we are expecting a baby! We prayed for this little one for months and God has heard us and blessed us! We will try to keep this blog updated as our pregnancy progresses. We are currently 10 weeks pregnant. Our baby is the size of a small lime and has all of his/her vital organs developed, can move his/her arms and legs and suck his/her thumb! 100 brain cells are being developed every minute! Can you believe how great is our God! What a miracle. This is a picture of our little peanut at 8 weeks when we went for our first scan. He/she even waved at us when we were watching. The baby is long already, so we are sure he/she will be tall like daddy.

Compassion Days

During the 4 weeks of our Keep Them safe holiday program during the World Cup, we offered a variety of programs to the children and teens who came to the center. On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings, our volunteers (from Germany, Brazil, America, and South Africa) teamed with our Kayamandi youth volunteers led Kids Games in the mornings from 9:00am until 12:00pm. Kids games is an internationally known program that reaches kids for christ using games and sports. Then at 12:00 the kids went for lunch and continued with an afternoon program that included arts, team games, dramas, and special events until 4:00pm.

On Wednesdays, however, our kids morning program was a bit different. Wednesdays were our "Compassion Days" when our kids and teens went out into their community and learned about service by serving hands on. Across the 4 Wednesdays in the KTS time, our kids cleaned the streets, painted the play equipment at 2 parks, planted trees at 2 parks, leveled the ground for our new classrooms, and cleaned for the sick and elderly at their homes.

It was so beautiful to see the youth and children in Kayamandi taking ownership for the hygiene and cleanliness of their neighbourhood. Even now, weeks later, the kids are still looking out for "their" tree and making sure that nothing bad happens to it. Compassion Days are a great way to get kids thinking about other's needs and not just their own.

World Cup Holiday Program: KTS

The Soccer World Cup 2010 South Africa

During the Soccer World Cup in South Africa, from 11 June- 11 July 2010, our students were out of school and needing to stay busy in order to stay safe. Knowing the huge threat of child trafficking during this time, we organized a program in Kayamandi called Keep Them Safe (KTS). The great part about KTS is that the staff of Kuyasa did not run the show, we assisted our young emerging leaders from Kayamandi to plan, direct, and manage the huge 4-week event. The young leaders, who have just finished high school and who are interning at Kuyasa for the year, gained skills in event planning, people recruitment and management, conflict and time management, proposal writing and partnership with other NGOs and stakeholders. KTS was an intense 4-week long program that hosted about 800 children and 200 teens each day from 8am until 4pm across 6 different venues in Kayamandi. We were all exhausted, but through the strength and power of the Holy Spirit, we made it though still smiling.