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.

Workshops

The second week of our 2-weeks of holiday madness with our teens was great. We hosted workshops in public speaking, study skills, job interview skills, and ended with a speech contest. The 40 students started the speech workshop terrified to speak in front of others, but throughout the week and after lots of practicals we had 11 students compete in our speech competition. I was SO impressed at the variety of their "influential topics" and how well-prepared they were. The 6 winners will travel around with Cassie Carstens and a Brazilian soccer team as they talk to the local high schools here. Here is a picture of me speaking about speaking...

On the first day of our workshops after the public speaking portion we partnered with a group called Shout it Now who do HIV counselling and testing. They brought to our centre 50 laptops and showed the teens an interactive "MTV-style" interactive video about testing. It was a great programme and we hope to partner with them again in the future.

Service Projects

During the two-week school vacation, we were very busy. Our teenagers led the children in Kids in the morning and then after they fed the kids lunch, they had a chance to attend special teen activities. In the first week, our teens hosted "service projects." The service project teams were split into 4 groups: Cleaning parks and streets, cleaning schools, serving the sick and elderly, and appreciation of community heros. I led the appreciation team. In 1 week we baked 16 cakes and made 16 thank you cards for our community heros like the police, fire department, NGO's, social workers, doctors, nurses, orphanage workers, etc. The kids and teens then got to tell their community heros how much they appreciate all that they do. It was really special to hear the kids express themselves and how the people were so touched to get a thank you and a chocolate cake. The fire station were so pleased that they gave us a ride around in the fire truck until we were dizzy. It is so easy to show appreciation, but we so often take the time. Our young people learned the value of a thank you and we hope that the value of gratitude will follow them in their lives.

Kids Games

During the 2-week school vacation, we hosted a lot of special programmes that we would not have had the time to present during the normal school year. For 2 weeks we arrived at the office early and set up for a morning of Kids Games. Kids Games is an international programme that pairs games and fun with life lessons and experiential learning. We focused on the themes of serving each other, love, working as a team, respecting people and property, forgiveness, and honesty. We started each day with a drama to illustrate the theme and then our teenage youth leaders took the children in their team on a journey to experience the theme for themselves. We averaged about 200 children each day and saw the growth a huge success!