Southeast Asia 2013 Day Four

TIME WITH FATHER Like every morning of this trip this day started with a rich time of prayer. (o.k. well it technically started with Uganda Tea and a pop tart in my room but after that...it was on to daily devotion.) Seriously, the prayer times alone have been worth the travel to this side of the globe. We are so blessed to be under the guidance of a mature M team from the company. They have kept the focus on Father and finding His plan for people He has led us to. I HAVE FINALLY BEEN THERE! After morning devotion/prayer time, the P*stor and his wife we visited with yesterday came to our hotel to travel with us to an M people village. I was so excited I could hardly wait to get on with it! Our driver came and we loaded up into the small van for the one hour ride to a village where I would meet my first M People in person. We pulled up and almost immediately I saw an open doorway and there he was the cutest little tiny M person. 

I know expectations are what get us in life but I just thought I would meet a little old man coming in from the rice field or a lady carrying water for her family but, how cool is it that it was this little tiny baby boy that could barely walk. I grabbed my camera to capture this moment (pictures are forthcoming when we get enough bandwidth to load them) and suddenly the grandmother appeared and picked the little boy up and with a toothless grin let me know it was o.k. to take a picture. As we began to tour the village we realized a strange thing...kids were running down the road like crazy-they were everywhere. We were then told by our driver that they were out of school for lunch! Each day the children go to school from 8 to 10:30 and then run home for lunch and come back to finish the school day from 12:30 to 3:30. We toured the school and found it to be one of the poorest in the area with children struggling to even have the basic school supplies needed for class. (Tomorrow we will see what we can do to meet this need and bless them through the love offering our own children gave to CHFB VBS.

After touring the school, we were introduced to the village leader who insisted on taking us on a walking tour of the village.

As we walked through town we began to attract a following of beautiful children (imagine that!). By the time our tour was complete they were laughing and running circles around us mostly brought on by JW giving them a huge stash of tangerines he had brought to eat as a snack lunch. We ended our tour where it began in front of a huge 100+ year old tree with guitar in hand and kids squealing as we sang "Walk, Walk, Walk in the Light." It does not get any better than this!...or does it? Here's what we realized really happened to make this all a reality. The P*stor that we will be working with in this area had told us that he would accompany us to a certain M People village so we could see them and meet them first hand. Then the M couple called and hired a certain driver that our team was familiar with to drive us to this village. On the way, we find out that this driver grew up in this very village and was taking us to his own people! Only a Father as great as ours could work this out! As our guide said today: our Father plays three dimensional chess! HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH CORNER GOES BANANAS! We came back from the village ecstatic about the way Father had answered our pr*yers and led us to the M People. We ate a quick lunch and then it was on to do an English corner we had been invited to by a teacher one of our teams had met on a previous trip here. An English corner is basically an extra curricular club like the Latin club that is dedicated to helping student become proficient in English. We have done these same English clubs at Universities in the past and I have seen as many as 60 or 70 kids show up. At this particular event somewhere between 300 and 400 students showed up. We sang some songs we had designed to help them learn English and they laughed hilariously as we taught them the motions. We ended by pulling kids from the audience and telling the story of The Prodigal ("from an ancient manuscript") while they each acted it out. It was so hard not to preach but, we had agreed not to do so. Still, the picture they saw of a loving, forgiving father is something we believe Father will use in the future to draw them to Himself.