Escuela Biblia de Vacaciones

That's Vacation Bible School in espanol! And what a couple of weeks of VBS we had in Guatemala in November! Remember that the kids here are out of school in November and December. Our first week was in Amatitlan where we had over 400 children come for a week of singing, playing, Bible stories and crafts. The children come pouring in off the streets and out of the shanty neighborhood for five days. We're able to use one of the public schools of Amatitlan (oddly enough named John F Kennedy Elementary School), which by our definition would be considered filthy, ugly and about the last place you'd want your child to spend their school day. But it was the only place we could meet that would accommodate that many kids. They allow us to use the facilities in exchange for a few school supplies like pencils and crayons. Andy said that last year they told us that they were so under-funded that they had to break pencils in pieces to give to the kids!

There are piles of desks thrown into a corner of each room and dozens and dozens of children are squished in to do their craft or hear God's Word. The awesome thing is that our VBS is conducted by just eight of our high school youth with the guidance of Oscar and Reyna. I stood and watched as over 400 children ran in and lined up according to age. Our teens had such quiet control over this massive group of niños with no raised voices. The various age groups moved from station to station, like we do in the States, ending their day with a little snack and bag of juice on their way out the door. Pretty incredible!

Well, after the week in Amatitlán, the teens braced themselves for another week of VBS, but this time with almost 250 kids in Guatemala City. Every afternoon for five days the kids in our neighborhood came to hear about their Jesus who loves the daylights out of them. You can just imagine what it would take to make crafts for almost 700 kids. We don’t have any handy resources from publishing companies with all the ideas and lessons prepared. Everyone who sat down at the ministry for the past month was handed a scissors and something to cut out! What a great two weeks! The teens did a collective sigh of relief last Friday when the final Christmas gift and hygiene kit was passed out to the last child. If you were in a church or on a mission team that sent or brought Christmas gifts last year, just about every single one of them was used for these almost 700 children. Oscar worked for days with Gerber and Julian to put the bags together. Since we had fewer teams come down this past year, we really scrounged and divided and emptied out Ziplocs of other things to have enough bags for the gifts. But we made it! And we gave out hundreds of hygiene kits as well. So thank you, friends of our ministry...friends of the Guatemalan children...for your gifts of love!!

It was a pretty crazy couple of weeks, but man, what an outreach. Hundreds of children taking the message home to their families!!We pray that the Holy Spirit will bless the Words that were taught so that these children might come to saving faith and that the seeds that were planted in their little hearts would grow.