Thursday January 17th 2008
Today I got up and went to the Cuarto community center. It’s just up the street from were we live. This building is the local church, medical clinic, dental clinic, community center, and elementary school. The school was the reason I came today.
The school held here is mainly for the orphans at the children’s home, but the school isn’t just for them. Kids International has also opened up their school to local kids. Mostly kids of widows and single parents. This more than doubles their attendance. They charge the parents nothing to send their kids to the school. Without this school these kid’s wouldn’t get ANY education.
I helped a class of small kids with a scavenger hunt. They had to find small different colored shapes like stars, squares, circles, etc. Once they found them they had to show us and tell us what they were. It was a fun time for all. I had to stay outside to keep an eye on the shapes. If I had gone inside the neighbor kids that don’t go to the school would have gone on their own scavenger hunt and left us with nothing to find. 
This afternoon I worked on the Kids International website. There is so much content to update. Much of the content hasn’t been updated in some time. I also put a video on the home page. They liked that one a lot.
Tonight after dinner I went up to the children’s home and helped put the kids to bed. This turned out to be the highlight of my day. Christy Linhart and I got there just in time to read stories to the kids and have them read them to us. Just when I decided that the little girl was really reading the book to me one of her friends who was not looking at the book started to “read” along word for word. This book turned out to be one of their favorites.
Once story time was over it was time for praise and worship. The kids totally get into this part of their evening routine. They sing loud and off key. It was amazing! After the singing they had one of the kids read the bible story for the evening. Then they talked about what it was about. It was very cool to see these kids sit and listen to the story. A feat we often have trouble with in this age group.
After the Bible lesson I read stories to the kids before they went to bed. One of the little boys insisted on a book written in Tagalog the local language. This worked in my favor because I got to make up a story to go with the pictures in the book. The little boy loved it.
That about wraps up the day. I hope you enjoyed seeing a little glimpse of my ministry here.
I leave you with a video of our worship time. Enjoy!
Kids worship service from mshrauger on Vimeo.
