Beaufort West: Christmas Parties

After 3 long weeks of Christmas parties at many locations around South Africa, with about 5000 children and adults attending. 16 very weary ER Christmas team members headed home. I thought that I would get a nice break and catch up with all my admin. That is the problem with being a one man operation, something always suffers and in my case it's the admin, so my appologies for late postings.
The day I dropped the last team member at the airport my truck broke down and because all auto electricians close after the 16th, I can't get it repaired until the new year, at least it gives me time to save. It is just difficult to drive around without a fuel guage, especially a V6.

We held 3 parties in Beaufort West. After travelling through the night after parties in Belhar we arrived late at our accommodation in BW. We got up early and started our first party at the container in Little Bagdad. This project called Sunset Ministries who teach, dance and drama as well as feeds 300 children from extremely poor background and many of them are abused or have been abused. We arrived to a celebrity welcome and we felt so humbled by these wonderful kids. There is absolutely no form of entertainment, churches, playing fields or play grounds in this area to keep the kids off of the streets. This ministry is the only light is an otherwise very dark area. These beautiful children put on a show for us. We went to bless them but we were the ones blessed when we left.

At all parties we did face painting, played games, played sport, did a craft, applied tattoo's, told the Christmas story with the Gospel of Salvation and then they were given a party pack and gift pack before they left.

Checkout

https://picasaweb.google.com/dcarnill?authkey=Gv1sRgCLC6p9D8yoDH9AE

https://picasaweb.google.com/charly.sommers

for all the photo's and action.

We then headed for Helping Hands prodject which Nashville Road is very involved in. Many of these precious children have one of the dread illnesses but because of Jesus using Nashville Road we have not lost a child in the last few years. This is one of the projects where we don't mind the children being naughty, we just praise Jesus that they are alive and doing well. Jerry Carnill, President of Extreme Response noted that the children were looking so good and healthy and had filled out so much since he last saw them - praise Jesus. I love coming to this project and seeing these kids and seeing how Jesus is changing their lives for the better. 200 children came to this party

Next the team went to The Christian Centre Church for a combined party between the chilren of this church and Pure Heart Ministries. Pure Heart runs the sanitary towel ministry among other things and The Christian Centre is the first Christ centred church we have partnered with. This has open doors into the community. Nashville Road sponsored an evangelical outreach in July of this year. We will be running leadership development seminars from this church a long with monthly evangelical outreaches. There were over 100 children at this party. By the time the team had finished this party, they were well and truly tired, humbled, excited and sunburnt. While the team went to lunch, I went and did the shopping for the various projects. If we had more time and team members we could have run at least another couple of parties for 1000 more kids.