The 3 musketeers and Dartagnan

Well this last few weeks have been weeks of adjustment with Martin and Rosa finally leaving and the “3 musketeers” as some here are calling Johanna, Larissa and I adapt to life running the ministry alone – well with our Dartagnan in the form of IK (ika) who is now running the youth and kids church. So far things are going well, although attendance to all the activities has been down, with only 54 kids coming to kid’s church/youth last week compared to a normal average of around 70. We believe this to be in part the leaving of Martin and Rosa but also the start of the school holidays. Schools here run from January to December (I know how random to have a school year that follows the actual year!) split into 2 semesters, we are now in the 4 week holiday between semesters.

As with last year we are spending the holidays running creative workshops for the kids, along with a football tournament. Since we are without a full time male worker at the moment it has fallen on my shoulders to organise the football calling on Phil from Australia and other guys from YWAM here to help with the actual refereeing bit! This morning’s round was cancelled as the pitch we are using was being used by another group who had more kids and are running a holiday long tournament every morning, so we told all the kids to come this afternoon. Wednesday and Thursday last week Deborah, my fellow Brit and her husband taught drama, this week an art student who was with us as part of an outreach team is coming back to teach art. In the next 2 weeks we have singing, craft and dance as well as the final of the football. We have some loose plans to have a show at the end but nothing definite this year.

Two girls using the library

With the youth now handed over to IK my role has changed to our fledgling library, we have 2 shelves of books, mostly out of date, and the screen of a computer!! So not much to go on at the moment! The vision is to develop a library space where the kids who are at school can come and do their homework or just read. We have had 2 weeks of pilot with some kids coming, however this has highlighted that we don’t have enough books, or at least ones that are useful to them, therefore my laptop is being used to research some items, but we are working on getting a computer for the library, preferably more than one. So one of the things I am doing at the moment is working on finding donations of books and for books. We have been approached by a grant making charity who have given us money before to make an application so as this is an American charity I am going to put a bid in for new books and computers. This is the first time I have done such a bid so we will see how it turns out!!

The flood!! 

In other news, the rains are back!!! And so on Saturday last week Johanna and I found ourselves sweeping the rain water out of the house again until midnight! It was worse this time due to the work we have had done on the house. Before the patio would flood due to the amount of water coming into it from the roof of the building, well now we have the extension this water is all channelled off into a small opening between us and the house next door, this 2 foot wide closed passage, has a drainage hole that the builders thought would be sufficient to let all the water out, however, we have discovered it isn’t!! It was sufficient for the water that fell from the sky into that part but it cannot handle all the water coming from the roof as well, so the water got deeper and deeper until it finally came in through the window of our living room!!! And became the main source of water flooding into the house, along with various gaps in the ceiling, and water coming in through the drain in the bathroom!! So the builder was called again and has been to make some adjustments and we are now awaiting the next monsoon to see if we are now watertight! 

Well that's all from me for now, take care stay blessed

Petra