Day 4 – Fun with the Community Program

It’s Monday – today were excited to begin working with the kids in Brazos de Amor’s Community Cares Program! The program is Brazos de Amor’s outreach to the local neighborhood children. These children live in an under-resourced community and Brazos de Amor provides educational enrichment (tutoring, computer and English classes) as well as a meal to the children and support and classes for the parents.

This morning, 14 kids from the local community came to Brazos. Shaina lead a name game with Koosh balls, Emilio led the children in some songs and gave a lesson on the immenseness of God. With a 42″ beach ball representing our sun and a marble representing Earth Emilio explained that the VY Canis Majoris, a hyper giant star, would be approximately 1 mile wide in comparison to our sun. We talked about God’s amazing power to create huge things as well as create us individually. For craft time Emeline demonstrated making a paper star by making a single cut.

Meanwhile Wes, Prescott, Gladys and Adele headed to town to get a few needed supplies from town. They enjoyed their visit to the a Nicaraguan version of Home Depot.

In the afternoon our team repeated the morning Community Cares program for 17 more kids.

Simultaneously, Wes helped out with prep for our construction project tomorrow. This included helping with tree work, clearing branches above a building where a new roof will go, and milling some of the wood.

Once the Community kids went home we had free time. However, instead of resting after a full day of community kid programs, many of the energetic team members sought out the resident kids. Several hours were spent in competitive games of Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, Uno, pick up soccer as well as endless rounds of tag!

After a delicious dinner of enchiladas nicaraguenses, our team split into thirds again to lead devotions with the residential kids. The older kids had devotions on God as Creator, which also included rousing games of ‘I love my neighbor who..’ and ‘Two truths and a lie’, while the younger boys who got home late from soccer practice had more of a bedtime story style devotion on a beautiful book called Cercano, describing the truths about God’s love and unique creation of us based on Psalm 139.

In our team debrief this evening many team members commented it was a day full of many highlights. We are feeling very blessed to have had a full day with a wide variety of fun memories!

Off to sleep soon – tomorrow we will be attending the Brazos de Amor Staff retreat, heading to town to find some more supplies as well as beginning to reconstruct the roof on an auxiliary building.