In my last post, I shared about how my team and I were working to put together an outreach event for the street kids after we had witnessed them being mistreated. The week leading up to the event, I was really excited to be able to offer the kids a warm meal and connect them with mentors from the church so they would have access to safe adults who can advocate for them. Even though I was very passionate and driven towards this cause, I found myself getting more and more frustrated because I had no idea how this was going to come together. I needed a translator to be able to communicate with the kids and I was wondering how they were even going to remember the date, time, and place for the event.
On the day of the event, I spent half the day in the kitchen cooking huge portions of food even though I had no idea how many kids would show up for the event. Then it came time for us to go to the park, we all piled in to our big van and headed to the place where the outreach was supposed to take place. I was in a huge rush to get there because we had left pretty late and I was worried the kids would be wondering where we were.
When we got to the park, there was not a single one of the kids in sight. I was heartbroken…I had just spent the week trying to inspire people to want to do this, and then cooked this big meal, and now it was just us at the park. It dawned on me that it was kind of overly optimistic to think that kids who spend their days on the street begging would have been able to know that the day was Saturday, to walk to a park at a certain time, and to even believe that we would show up (how many times do you think people have disappointed them in the past?).
I was feeling REALLY discouraged. Then I remembered, Oh God wants this to succeed…he is the one who gave me the eyes to see the needs of these kids. I silently asked him to bring the kids to the park. Then, one of the volunteers said, “you know, there is another park right down the street, maybe we should check to see if they went to the wrong one.” We walked to the other park and the boys came running up to us with the biggest smiles on their faces. They had been waiting for us the whole time. You should have seen how excited they were when they saw us come for them. They grabbed us by the hands and we started walking back to the other park. As we were walking back to the other park, the boys took off in to the woods. We were confused and wondering where they were going, as we started to look through the trees to see what they were doing, we saw that they were washing off in a stream. They wanted to be clean for dinner.
When we got back to the first park, we had a total of 20 boys show up for our event. The weather was perfect, we had a tarp for them to sit on and plenty of room. We began by signing some worship songs and then we were able to serve generous portions to all the boys and give them each a soda. After dinner, one of the volunteers from the school who is also a great speaker, shared the gospel message and encouraged the boys. At the end he invited them to stand up and invite Jesus in to their hearts, and they all did. We ended the night by separating them in to groups based on location and hooking them up with mentors for the future. It was definitely one of my favorite days on the race!
Thank you supporters for making it possible for me to be here and be a part of moments like this 🙂
Please consider sharing my information with friends and family as I still need to raise $6000 by January 1st to be able to continue on to South America!
