Kendal is helping staff a vacation bible school for the national children. There are 300 signed up. It will be interesting to see how many will show up, as when you ask parents if they want to bring their kids, your typical answer culturally is "yes".
There is a pretty dramatic story tied to the last VBS. One of the little boys grew attached to the son of the VBS instructor and in turn quickly became a small part of their family.
One day his father showed up and thanked them for loving his son. Apparently this man was a notorious criminal and brother of many criminals. Through this relationaship all three gave up crime and came to Christ.
So please pray for the VBS and for Kendal's involvement.
Today in our Tok Pisin church, we prayed for:
-a ministry for the young children
-a new ministry for the youth
-a ministry for non believing adults
-a ministry for believing adults who want to learn to help in translation and literacy
-existing translation projects
-translation projects finishing up.
That is a huge spectrum of people and involvement.
The two chief issues that I see in this country right now are:
-AIDS - we are in epidemic proportions now, and soon to reach Africa's level.
-Youth - the culture is starting to realize that their youth are in need of strong moral role models and leadership. Ministries are starting to pop up to meet that need.
It is exciting to see reaching out to the community in so many ways.
Please be praying for this week and VBS.
And, a note on the family front,
today the kids and I made a tin can telephone.
It actually works quite well!
http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/phone.html
Sydney insisted on decorating each can, and I replied that they could each decorate 1 can.
s-"but calvin doesn't know how to draw the numbers good!"
me-"what numbers?"
s-"the numbers for the phones!"
me-"what are those numbers for?"
s-"to dial phone numbers"
me-"what are phone numbers for?"
s-"so you call the right person."
me-"and how could you call the wrong person?"
s-"if you dialed the wrong number"
me-"and how many phones are there in the world?"
s-"millions"
me-"and how many phones are there on this tin can phone?"
s-...long pause..."two"
me-"so if you're on one phone, how many phones do you need to call?"
s-"one"
me-"and can you ever get the wrong number?"
s-"no"
me-"so how many numbers do you need to decorate on your phone?"
s-"well, either one or none. I suppose calvin can do that alright."
Quite literally an hour later they had their lines crossed as they had tangled their tin can phone string in a tree. After they were complaining of "busy signal" for a while, I came and untangled it for them.
