¡VBS!

These past two weeks have been AWESOME!!!!

Every year my church in PR has a Vacation Bible School camp (VBS) for kids in our town.  In the past, kids have signed up and come to the church for the camp.  This year, we decided to try a different approach!  We wanted to reach kids who don't go to church and who don't know about Jesus.  So, we decided to go into the projects and the government housing neighborhoods in my town.

There are three government housing complexes ("caserios" in Spanish):
1) Yuquiyú II (this is a calm area, but it is right up the hill from El Cemí).
2) El Cemí (this is an extremely dangerous and poor part of town.  They say that there are two drug points in this area and there is gang activity and drug related shootings here often).
3) Diego Zalduondo (this is in a different part of town from the other two caserios, it is a nicer area and it is very calm).

Last week we did VBS in Yuquiyú II.  We also invited the kids from El Cemí to come and join us there. Monday was what we called "controlled chaos". On Wednesday we had 46 kids (mostly from the Cemí).   ¡It was total CHAOS!  My job is registration and "crowd control"- I couldn't even count how many fist fights there were on Wednesday- it was CRAZY!  I really enjoyed playing with these kids after the VBS.  We would play at the park, and we had about 15 kids on one teeter-totter at once!  So, I really enjoyed the week, but it was a wake up call, and we all learned that the kids in that area of town need a lot of love, guidance, teaching, and patience.

Part of my job was the registration table- eeekkk!

Karla was my helper, so together we registered over 40 kids each day!

It took us about 5 minutes to line up every day.

Story time!

Play time!  Everyone was on the teeter-totter at once- ¡That was TONS of fun!

This week we are doing the same VBS, but with the kids from Diego Zalduondo.  WOW, what a difference!  These kids sit down and listen to the Bible story, they take time on their craft, they are honest, and they do not fight with each other.  AND, they know how to FOLLOW DIRECTIONS!!!! Today we had 56 kids and everything went smoothly!!!!  I am really enjoying this club because we can spend our time getting to know the kids instead of disciplining them.

Bob (our pastor) brings his unicycle and takes the kids for rides:)

The mayor of the city came to see the work that we are doing with the kids- how cool!!!

Story time!  We learned about David and GOLIATH!

The older kids!

Me with the younger kids!- I love this age group:)

 Friday was crazy day- we joked that this kid came down from the rainforest-hahaha

We also did face painting:)

Here is a video of all 50+ kids singing.  It was really loud!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYfTMN2IJ8g 

My schedule is finally winding down.  I took Spanish II as a summer class and it was a TON of work.  I learned all about the seven types of complex sentences, the hard and soft vowels, hiato, diptongo, aguda, llana, and estrújula words and how to analyze poetry (this is hard enough to do in English, yet alone in Spanish).  So, now that I am done with that, I have some free time to just sit in the hammock and relax.