Current Activities and Hope for Future Developments

We’ve had a growing number of children showing up on Saturdays and since we can’t keep up with the numbers, I have decided we will have an additional day for the children’s activities. The children between ages 3 and 7 (or 8) now come on Fridays and the children 9 and up come on Saturdays. I do let a few 2-year-olds come because they are Molly’s friends and she likes having people her own size. Unfortunately this results in more broken crayons. (Note to self: in the future, always buy twistable crayons; notice the difference).

I don’t allow children under 2 because it is just way too complicated and chaotic and it involves lots of crying and snatching things and pee on the floor. Anyone who shows up with a baby is sent away to deposit the baby elsewhere and then they are free to come back.

The age cut-off is a rough estimate because I don’t have an exact age for each child, I just keep a list of the names of all the kids who have Friday as their day, and another list of those who are supposed to come on Saturday. One reason for this new system is because some of the games we have just work better for older kids and it goes more smoothly when the groups are broken up a little more by age. Also, there are just too many children to have at one time.

I had been doing groups of 10 (or less) at a time and giving each group about an hour in the house, but I was up to 3 or 4 groups which made Saturdays long and more exhausting than fun, plus I was trying to have the kids out of the house during nap times. It’s been good practice in managing chaos. I also started to turn away sick children. This was extremely difficult, especially the first time. Eileen has been sick so frequently (about once every two weeks since we’ve arrived) that I decided I really needed to lay down the law and keep out children who were coughing or visibly running at the nose. The first two or three kids I turned away looked so forlorn and pathetic and disappointed. It was really quite sad. But I told them as soon as their symptoms resolved, they could come back, even if it was before their designated day.

So now we’ve grouped everyone into two days, with one group coming on Friday, and 2 groups coming on Saturday. I’m expecting my Friday group to increase to two groups soon. This system is working so far, although it’s fairly new.

My next plan for improvement is to start a Bible story lesson during the coloring time for the older kids. I’m not really sure where to begin with this, especially because I no longer have a Lingala Bible, which I found very useful in doing Bible lessons with my teenage girls group in Impfondo.

I started last Friday with the little kids, talking through some of the pictures in a Molly’s little kids Bible story book. It worked out well that the group that came were only Congolese children, none of the Muslim kids. I don’t feel like I can do Bible teaching with the Muslim kids there without talking to their parents first. But for the Congolese kids it’s no problem.

The kids comments and questions revealed their complete confusion relating to all things God, Jesus and church. These children occasionally attend church with their parents, but I’m not sure of the soundness of the church or the sources of where the kids got some of their ideas. I tried to just simplify things as much as possible. It made it easier having only 6 kids this time. At one point I asked each child to tell me one thing they had done wrong. At first they all said they’d never done anything wrong. Then I named a few examples like lying, hitting, etc. We went around the circle and everyone named something bad they had done, including myself. After that, I explained about how God hates these things and a solution was needed if God wanted to have people with Him again. So then we talked about Jesus and His death and resurrection. I’m not sure how much the kids took away from this first lesson but they seemed pretty interested (which actually surprised me) and I think we’ll try again next Friday.

Now that I have a good system going, the children like coming, they have fun and play games and trust me enough, it’s the perfect time to start this. I want the kids to go away with more than just a torn out page from a Dollar General coloring book.