What A Day!

Neema Village Kids Help with VBS

October 14, 2019

What a day! As part of Neema’s spiritual outreach program seven of our volunteers and our big school kids from Neema Village in Arusha, Tanzania went out to help Emily Broadbent with a VBS for Shabani’s school.   Pictured below Shabani in the middle with our kids Elesha, Julius, Joshua and Nengai.

Neema bought juice boxes, apples and cookies for gift bags for the students and our kids had a lot of fun packing the bags to give out to the students at Shabani’s school. It is an extremely poor school with no government help so we take big bags of rice and beans when we go to visit.

Our Buena Vista, Colorado volunteers, Judy Pankow, Ron and Carol Flowers and Kim Meyers got in on the fun. Below Judy is helping our kids pack the bags with juice boxes and candy for the 39 students at the school.  

They took our bean bag toss game, parachute game with big smiley yellow balls and egg games all of which turned out to be a lot of fun for the kids.

Maeve Lee from South Carolina and Kim Meyers helped with the parachute game above. Emily taught the bible lesson and Ashley Berlin led the songs pictured below.

It was a good lesson on sharing for our big kids to hand out the gift bags to the students.  There were extra neighbor kids so our children did not get a bag but not a one fussed about that.

Below Elesha, Patricia and Joshua are pictured handing out the bags.

Shabani was one of our abandoned babies who went home to his grandmother a few years ago and we are helping with his schooling. His grandmother lives in a very poor village far away where the elephants from the game parks still come through and raid her corn.  The village school where Shabani had been going was closed by the government so all 39 of the village children had been brought in to a school in Arusha. Shabani and his friends were sleeping on the floor in a local church in order to go to the school.  (Pictured below Kim and Maria with Shabani.)

Shabani’s grandmother had told us that since Shabani had been raised Christian at Neema Village for the first four years of his life she would let him continue to be raised Christian. She changed his name from Shabani to Jackson, a Christian name. We are grateful for her decision, but it will be hard for us to not remember this sweet baby as Shabani.

If you remember baby Shabani was the impetus for us starting the MAP program. Six years ago when Michael received a call from the police that an abandoned baby had been found, he went out to find the young mother had been identified by the neighbors and she was being dragged off to jail wailing and crying.  Our hearts knew this young mother did not belong in jail and we needed to do something to help these moms who abandon their babies.

I think God often uses these kinds of stirring moments to get a job done that He wants done.

May we always listen to these God moments!

Dorris