While the majority of our ministry this month was focused on teaching English, two teammates and I had the opportunity to put on a VBS type event for indigenous children. Our day began with a local pastor taking us out to the remote village where these children lived with their families. When we were close to the village, we encountered two men from the village that were going hunting with blowdarts, no lie! That’s how remote/out in the jungle of Malaysia we’re talking about.
Once we arrived we were introduced to some of the elders in the community and then we had our first mission: gather kids for our event. That was a bigger effort than anticipated because of their extreme shyness and the fact that they spoke no English. Their shyness, on second thought, was totally understandable. Random adults from somewhere far away had come to their town for who knows what? I would have probably done the same! Some of the elders told us some words in their language that we could speak. “Hao” means “come” and “alo” means “hello” (not sure about the spelling for either of those), so with the only two words that we knew we fanned out into the community trying to get kids to come with us. Most of the kids that I encountered just looked at me with a look that said, “I’m not going anywhere with you.” Finally with the help of some parents/elders we got a group of a little over 20 kids to join us. That being said these kids were still extremely shy and were all lined up against a wall as far away from us as they could get.
We tried to start off breaking the ice with a game of Limbo, but we quickly learned that was a no go. Our next idea was to hand out some snacks! Each kid was super polite and took some snacks but they were still not completely opening up to us. Running out of ideas, we decided to sing “Your Love is Deep,” a song I sing a lot with my Young Life Capernaum friends back in Nashville. The song goes, “Your love is deep, Your love is high, Your love is long, Your love is wide,” and you can do hand motions with the song. The kids couldn’t sing the words because they did not know English but they could do the hand motions so as we sang the kids did the motions with us and we finally were breaking some ice and the morning ended up being one of the best of the race so far!
We got to act out The Parable of the Good Samaritan, outline hands and draw in them to symbolize giving a helping hand (drawing, as it turned out, was new for many of these kids so we got to show them this too), play hot potato, run around a lot, play Limbo (for real this time), green light/red light, and so much more. There was so much smiling, fun, laughter, and love in that place and it was cool to see how kids that were so shy come alive!
I’m thankful that I had the opportunity to go to this village even if it was only once, and I’m thankful for the pastors that continue to go out to these communities to build lasting relationships and share the love of Christ with his people. Though we didn’t have an easy way to communicate with the kids, I’m confident that the Lord will be able to use our time, as small as it was, for his glory. At the end of the day it is not about how many songs we sang, how many games we played, or how great we were able to articulate the gospel, but about the Lord working on the hearts of those children. I’m honored that the Lord gave me the opportunity to play even the tiniest role in advancing his kingdom here in Malaysia.
Our second attempt at Limbo was much better than the first!
Singing your Love is Deep.
Holding up the hands that we drew!
A fun game of hot potato!
Teaching the kids our Chainless handshake!
Rachelle made a new friend.
Group pic!
