It’s been a long and exciting summer. Since some people didn’t get to hear about the Colombia trip, I thought I would post up a quick overview of what we did there. We started out with excitement when our flights were cancelled due to a pilot strike for Spirit airlines. The strike ended and we were able to get flights for the next day.
Most days followed a fairly normal schedule. We’d arrive at CRAN (the orphanage) in the morning and spend the morning running a vacation Bible school type of program. It would end at about lunch time and our team would help serve lunch to the children. They were usually pretty tired by then, so we’d chill with the kids for another hour or so and then head off for an evening excursion. These varied from day to day and included Colombian markets, landmarks, and restaurants.
Our program included 4 groups of kids and 4 stations for them to rotate through. We had an art room set up with daily projects as well as a group time for the kids to hang out with their counselors. My area was the games. We played a variety of games with a lot of repeats for the more popular games, like the trip rope game pictured below.
The focus of our trip was all in the class sessions. We taught all about Moses and his exciting adventures in Egypt. Can you guess our medium for teaching? Flannel board of course. The kids loved seeing everything stick in place, and they really enjoyed the accounts of Noah’s life. We were concerned about their attention for this session, but we aimed our prayers at this point and the response of the children was remarkable. They went from shredding the art room and driving our teacher there nuts to staying silent and listening with anticipation to the Bible accounts.
The trip back was smooth, although stressful at some of the airports. Our impact on the children was immediately evident in some ways, but the relationship between our church and this orphanage will go on. It’s not a Christian orphanage, but by offering them help for even a week of the summer we are giving the kids a glimpse of the Gospel that they might not get otherwise. Garrison Hills plans to continue this relationship and continue proclaiming the Gospel in Bogota whenever possible.
It was great getting to know the kids and I know that many of the team wished they could bring a couple orphaned children home. The trip really helped me see the culture first hand. I was surprised at how much Spanish came back to me, although I was much better at speaking it than listening. Usually I was about 10 words behind the locals. Overall it was just a great experience and I was thankful God allowed me to be minister to those great kids.
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