Cafezinho with Kris: Back to the Dump in Brasília

Michael (official photographer) and Carol (friend and children's program team member)

On May 17, Asas coordinated a 3rd Project "Go Ye" at the city dump of Brasília. Steve, the kids, and I left on Friday evening for Brasília after a rough time of getting backed up because we were without energy in the house. But we finally got things together and made it to Brasília at 10pm. We spent the night with some friends of ours who live in an apartment not far from the dump (Herberth and Carla). Steve and the kids were coughing and congested due to head colds and Maira woke up at 2am complaining of an ear ache. I tried giving her more decongestant medicine, but it did no good. By 5am she was shaking either from too much decongestant medicine or from the pain in her ear and she was asking me to call the dentist, call Aunt Otnaracy (our doctor from Asas), or anyone else who might give her relief from the pain. I asked Steve to wake up our friends to see if they had any pain killers that might relieve the pain. All they had was pain relief medicine for adults, so we cut it in 3rds and gave her 1/3. This finally helped her enough to enable her to sleep, but that only left us about 1 1/2 hours of sleep before needing to get up and get ready to go to the dump. Ugh. Thankfully, Carla was not planning on going to the project, so we left Maira at the apartment with her for the morning. Herberth went with us, but returned to the apartment a little before lunch to get Maira and bring her out to us. She at lunch with us and wanted to stay, so she stayed the rest of the day and was just fine. Aunt Otnaracy was there attending the people who live at the dump and she made time to see Maira and determined that her ear was not infected. Apparently, the congestion in her head had settled down towards her ear as she slept and was putting pressure on her ear and that is what caused so much pain. Anyway, we had a great day! Michael was in charge of taking pictures all day and he took that seriously....he took 103 pictures! He also helped out with the kids' program, telling kids the meanings of the colors of the wordless book bracelets and the general "go fetch..." guy. I put Maira in the group of 4-5 year olds to accompany all that they did in their workshops and she loved participating and answering the questions that the different "aunties" or teachers asked in the workshops. Steve went door-to-door evangelizing and was the coordinator for that. He also put together a program in the evening for the youth of the church with testimonies and the projection of the short version of The End of the Spear. I coordinated the children's programs and I had a great team . Everything went so smoothly in spite of last-minute potential stresses. I found out as we were leaving for Brasília that one of the girls on my team couldn't go anymore because she was sick and had gone to the hospital. She was responsible for the story workshops. Thankfully another girl on the team knew the story that she was to tell in the morning and then I asked another team member to do games instead of the story in the afternoon. Then in the morning I found out that yet another girl on my team was sick and hadn't come! Anyway, I had a great, flexable team who kept the focus and didn't let the set-backs get them down. We had 80+ children in the morning program and 150+ children in the afternoon program! We told the 80+ in the morning to bring their friends for the program after lunch...and they were very obedient! I took the kids back to the apartment just before the program for the youth in the evening...they were both so tired and so DIRTY! How wonderful it is to have friends that live in Brasília! Now for the pictures:

At the end of the afternoon, we handed out these bags with popcorn, coloring book, 2 toys, and streams with the colors of the wordless book to all the children who came to the program.

Herberth and Carla

Look at those attentive faces!

The children made a mural about the salvation story.

This was part of my workshop. I used "Claves" for the first time. It is a program that was developed by Youth for Christ in Uruguay with the goal of strengthing children against abuse. I'll tell you more about it in another post.