Closing & Concerts

After School Program is over for another year. We closed on Thursday with about 30 kids in attendance. After an hour for study, they were divided into teams for an obstacle course Steven and I had set up. (It involved hopscotch, catching hackey-sacks, dribbling (the soccer variety, not saliva) and scoring a goal.) To help them recover they then got ice cream and a little goodie bag to take home.

They managed to finish their Bible verse hangings on Monday – just sticking the things together took a lot of time when there was only one tube of glue! (We couldn’t find one, and the other one ran out with the first group.) As the aim of doing the hangings was to help them remember the Bible Club lessons from the term, I hope the kids glance at them occasionally over the holidays!

It’s not over until…
So things are winding down for the year, but it’s not all over just yet. Tangee (the chairperson of the EBCAIDS Committee) and I will be attending a three-day course on Project Management at the Polytechnic next week. Hopefully we’ll pick up some information that will help with managing EBCAIDS.

After that there’s a quiet week, before Home Based Care training from 10 to 14 December. Please pray for this as the details haven’t quite been finalized yet and I’m having difficulty contacting the trainer from AIDS Care Trust (a local NGO) as she is currently out of town.

Concerts & more concerts
I had to leave the After School at the ice cream stage on Thursday, as Samara’s pre-school Christmas concert was on that evening. They did a great job of presenting a message about Jesus being the reason for Christmas, while still working in the traditional Nativity play. The youngest class (Samara’s) just had the responsibility of singing enthusiastically, which they certainly did.

And that followed the Sunday School Christmas concert last Sunday, where Samara DID say her memory verse (although a little shyly), as did Caietta – who got one of the biggest rounds of applause because, although no one could really understand what she was saying she just sounded so cute saying it!

The concert had one of the more startling birth scenes I’ve seen in a Nativity play, with ‘Joseph’ delivering the baby quite realistically! Oh well, unless the innkeeper’s wife was summoned, I guess it would have been up to Joseph, wouldn’t it?

Jimmy heads up north on Monday for work – yes, I know there weren’t supposed to be any more trips, but this is an emergency (some transformer or something blew up…). And we’re preparing for the church’s AGM next weekend. Speaking of which, I’d better get back to writing the EBCAIDS Report for the year!

Don't lose sight...

The year is (maybe not so gradually) drawing to a close. What, you might say, it’s only the middle of November! Well, school’s due to finish in 3 weeks’ time for the year and most of the school kids finish their exams at the end of next week. After that they basically hang around at school for 2 weeks, so many of them go on holidays ‘early’. (Besides which, the schools have a habit of closing a few days earlier than the official end date…)

And once it’s school holidays, Windhoek could almost close down. Families go away on holidays either to their farms, or to the coast, or down to South Africa (which evens things up a bit with all the South Africans coming up here!). Some businesses close for three or four weeks; but most (except for banks, supermarkets, etc) for at least two weeks over the Christmas-New Year period.

So our last day of After School Program will be the 22nd, next week Thursday. We’re going to have a bit of a party for the kids. In craft they’re working on some Bible verse hangings, so hopefully they’ll finish those on Monday and will be able to take them back home to remind them of some of the lessons they’ve learned in Bible Club this term.

We had a Christmas-themed Bible Club this week, with the main message being not to lose sight of Jesus at Christmas. The kids participated enthusiastically as usual (see the pictures of singing time!). And, yes, that’s Kauna showing the kids how to do the actions properly!

On the home front: remembering
Jimmy and I celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary on Wednesday and were able to go out for a lovely meal while our good friend Vasisee babysat.

And tomorrow is the Sunday School’s Christmas program at church (it’s Saturday afternoon as I type this and the kids are at the church, practising hard for it). Then on Thursday Samara has her Pre-school Christmas concert. So we’ve got no excuse for not remembering that Christmas is just around the corner (how many days and counting?).

But let’s take the message of the Bible Club with us and not lose sight of Jesus in all the shopping and parties and concerts and ‘whatever-all-else’ (as a friend of mine would say) that this time of the year is filled with. Let’s each find something special to do this Christmas that reminds us of the real reason we’re celebrating – the birth of God’s son so that we could be reconciled to Him.

Scrabble tiles & short-termers

Thankfully Kauna didn’t suffer too badly with the chicken pox – she made it to the Program on Tuesday, although she wasn’t feeling too well, but by Wednesday she was fine and seemed back to normal by the end of the week.

Too often we think that we need expensive books or games or learning aids to help the kids, when really all that’s needed is a bit of imagination.

Scrabble tiles
Kauna proved this on Wednesday when she brought along some old Scrabble tiles (I don’t know whose set she took them from…) and let the kids play a spelling game. They were divided into a girls’ team and a boys’ team and each given tiles. Then they had to spell out the words Kauna gave them, and the first team to get it right got a point. She made it a bit more complicated by not just giving them words but telling them to spell “the opposite of tall” or “the past tense of read”. And they loved it! It sounded so exciting that the kids who were studying with me suddenly decided they’d learned all they could and begged to go and join in. The boys’ team was the clear winner, much to the chagrin of the girls.

The boys' team technique was interesting

Spelling is a big problem – and I guess we all admit that English is a tricky language that way. Some of the kids can express themselves very well and know how to do their homework, but when it comes to putting the words on paper then it’s a different story. So if anyone has other ideas for simple games, please let me know!

The girls' team - a bit confused?

Short-termers
My Wednesday morning was taken up with doing orientation on HIV/AIDS in Namibia for five new short-term missionaries with AIM (Africa Inland Mission), something I do about once every 2 to 3 months. It’s something I particularly enjoy, finding out what these (mainly) young people know about HIV and AIDS, and then helping them to understand the different situation and context there is here, compared to what they’ve known in their home countries (in this case all of them were from Canada, but this year the arrivals have also been from the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Germany).

After I do the facts and statistics then Pelgrina, a Namibian who along with her six-year-old son is living with HIV, comes and shares her story in the afternoon. It’s important that we don’t stop at the figures, but understand what HIV means for real people.

On the home front: the end is near!
…the end of the year, that is. Which means that Christmas ads are on tv, Christmas decorations are in the stores, and Samara is practising for Christmas concerts both at pre-school and at Sunday School. She’s already mastered her memory verse for the Sunday School concert (Luke 2:51), hopefully she doesn’t get stage-fright like she did last year! Before we know it, Christmas will be upon us.