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Loving kids… So yes, we know that we need to reach out to the children and that is part of our ministry here. God has made this clear. We also know this will not be easy for us as the local non-church kids continue to use frustrating methods in attempts to get our attention such as banging on the windows, throwing rocks inside the church, yelling constantly, peeing on the roof, and jumping on the tin roof.

We pretty much knew it was only a matter of time before one of the kids got hurt or someone fell through our bathroom roof. The day the boys went to San Juan was the day the roof over our bathroom broke. 

We were inside the church at the time it happened and heard the roof coming crashing down. Much to our surprise, the kid didn’t fall into the bathroom and somehow managed to have not gotten hurt.   Here is a picture of Malin.
 
We went outside to examen the damage as you can see from the photos below. Unfortunately, the roof caving in made it difficult to open the door to get and out of bathroom. This also significant reduced the amount of space we would have to take bucket showers in there, not to mention the fact that the kids climb on the fence all the time and now they have clear visibility if someone is showering or going to the bathroom. We are now also much better targets for when they try to throw rocks in the bathroom. Needless to say, we were not too happen about the situation, but we were not surprised either.

Fortunately, some of the guys from the church came the following day to try to fix mend the roof a little bit and put up barbed wire around the fences to try and prevent children from climbing on it. But, we noticed the day after the barbed wire was us, the kids had already jumped over it. I gotta hand it to them, they are persistent.

The children we struggled with were crying out for attention. While we were in Arroyo Cano, there was a 2 ½ week long festival with a lot of music, eating, drinking, and dancing. The children’s parents were all at this festival all night long and then sleeping all day. So the children were free to roam without restrictions or limitations. With this comes an increased longing for attention since they are not receiving it at home.

Even though these children (the local, non-church kids) were challenging for us this month and we struggled at times to love them, God is working on our hearts and is giving us orphanage work in Haiti in February and Cambodia in March. So, we will have plenty of time and practice learning to love His children around the world.