Merry Christmas & a blessed new year!

Rapid growth of community centre Casa Semear!

It´s already a long, long time ago since I´ve last updated this weblog… By now, so many things have happened that it is impossible to write just one short post ;0)

So I´ll just post several short updates about everything that has happened around here.

In the past months community centre Casa Semear has grown significantly and we have been busy reorganizing the project. Until last September, the kids didn´t need to subscribe or anything: they would just turn up and participate in the program whenever they felt like it. This had never been a problem, because up till then we had a group of only 35 kids participating. So that was perfectly doable and, as long as this lasted, we didn´t worry about it. 

But last June things started to change… We got access to another, bigger favela in our neighborhood and soon the people got to know Casa Semear and would spread the word that there was a great program for the kids & teenagers of their community. As a consequence, our group of kids suddenly grew from 35 up till around 90!! Even though this was great progress and we noticed God´s guidance in it, He was opening more doors for us to be able to reach more families & kids, we started to worry: How many kids can the 5 of us handle?? What is doable and what is our limit? 

The team of Casa Semear

In August we received a new, important team member: Eliane, a professional social worker who came to help us out exactly at the right time! She´s been of great help to us and has been busy organizing & administrating the community centre: during the month September we had the parents of all the kids come in to register their children. This means that now we have a fixed group of about 90 kids who participate actively in our program. Eliane maintains regular contact with the parents, supports and advices these families (58 in total!!) and every now and then she organizes workshops and interactive lessons about relevant subjects for specifically the moms. Now that we have Eliane working with us, the community centre also finally got it´s very own office (although really tiny), phone line and internet connection. Important progress!

Eliane, the social worker

We´re very excited about this period of quick growth the community centre has been going through. We really see God´s guidance in all these things that happened; He connects us with more and more families & kids, people who don´t know the Gospel yet and so desperately need God! It´s wonderful to be able to participate in what God is doing, giving us the chance to make His love & salvation known to these kids & teenagers! It is a huge task and in order to do a better job, we urgently need more staff! Will you join us in praying that God would call more people and bring them to us to work alongside us in this big responsibility He has given us? Or, if you are interested and would like to come over and work with us for some time as a volunteer, please do get in contact with us!

God bless you!

Caio & Dorothee

Furlough in Holland

This last July that just passed we had the chance to travel to Holland once again after a long year and a half. We spent 4 weeks of holidays with my (Dot) family; far from work, stress and rush hours; a time that we could rest, see the family and friends and do some presentations on our work with children at risk for ABBA in São Paulo. We enjoyed a lot the rest we had ´cause we definitely needed it so we could gain some new energy. Here are some small impressions of our time in Holland:

As always, it was great to be in Holland, my home country, being able to speak in Dutch, experience my own culture and get back to live with my parents again, just like in good old days.

A day of fun and laughter at the rollercoaster park with my siblings!

We visited the little old city called Quotshausen in Germany where my mom was born and from which we have many good memories of the holiday’s we would spent at my grandma´s house when we were kids. Such a special day.

For one whole week we traveled around Switzerland with my parents, a week of total retirement with no responsibility, no time schedule and a lot of opportunities to enjoy such a beautiful country. We walked a lot for sure.

During our stay in Holland we also invested time in meeting people who have been helping and supporting us during all this time we´ve been in missions. We had the opportunity to do two big presentations about our work in churches; besides that, we organized something smaller for our group of faithful supporters so we could thank them in a more personal way and also share our plans. We also visited some people who have shown real interest in us.  It was extremely encouraging to see all this care, interest and support from all these people around us. This helped us a lot and for sure was a good way to recharge our energies for the work.

Presentation in Dot´s home church

Here in Brazil we had been through some difficult situations because of our local church. We haven´t seen much interest and support from their part, so it was really important to see how many people in Holland have a real interest and actively support us. People have no idea how important this is for us. That´s what gives us courage and motivates us to keep working here in Brazil. So, thank you, everybody who was and is a part of this group that care for and support us.

And then, after 4 weeks, we returned to Brazil with full suitcases (how good it was to buy things that I Iove from my country! H&M, decoration supplies, and books, books and more books). As Caio said when we were flying over São Paulo, seeing this huge city beneath us: “Ok, now we are back to chaos.” And that was how we felt. It took us a while to adapt to everything again because it´s so different than Holland. But that´s the same when we go to Holland, we also need some time to get used to life there. I feel like Brazil is getting more and more like my country, the place where I feel at home. And I believe it´s good how this is working for me. But still, all these changes from one country to another are not an easy thing to do.

Now we are all well settled and started the work at Casa Semear at full power. In a next post we will tell you more about it.

May God bless you!

Love,

Caio & Dorothee

Teen camp!

It is the best week of the year according to the teenagers... A 5 day camp in the middle of nowhere, on the countryside of São Paulo, in the middle of the forest... A unique chance for most of the teenagers, because the majority of them never gets to go out of the slum where they live and have never left the concrete jungle of this huge city. Five full days in nature, away from the poverty and problems of every day; five days of friendship, laughter, (night)games and teachings about the Bible and the life of hope God wants to give us. Every year in July, during the winter holidays, we organize a teen camp and take 25 teenagers with us into the woods to spend some wonderful days together. And we know and have experienced that exactly these 5 days can be life changing for these kids...

And so we had a wonderful teen camp last July! God provided in wonderful ways everything we needed to run the camp: in the very last week before camp we managed to find a cook, enough money came in for food, materials and the bus, and surprisingly the weather was awesome (after two years of rainy, cold camps)! So we really felt a bit spoiled with all these blessings! Thank you all so much for your support and prayers!

We got to spend 5 long days with 24 noisy teenagers. It was a wonderful, busy time, sometimes quite challenging to maintain order. Every year we turn the camp into a competition between several groups; during the games they can earn points and also lose points because of breaking the rules or fighting. We always divide the groups in a way that teenagers who normally don´t really spend time together, are put in the same group and will have to work together. Every now and then this leads to arguing and fighting, but this year we saw once again that it is a good way to teach the teenagers to work together, care for the weakest, make new friendships and get over prejudice.

In one of the groups were four girls who don´t really get along well and so during camp things went completely wrong between them. On the morning of day 2 two of them were crying and the other two were ready to attack each other... But it was wonderful to see how this changed after a good talk about understanding and forgiving each other. By the end of camp they walked around as friends and it was their group who won the competition!

As far as the biblical content goes, we had a good camp too. We studied and lived through the whole journey through the desert. We talked mainly about trusting God, unity, contentment (in stead of complaining about everything) and stubbornness (and how this can complicate life). There were some scary moments during the night games in the dark forest, funny moments when the kids just threw themselves into the river because Faraoh was coming to get them, and some long, tiring walks through the woods (because the journey through the desert wasn´t that easy). I myself had a lot of fun when I managed to seduce the kids into building a golden calf out of clay (complete with gold spray and gold glitter), after which they suddenly realized that they of course weren´t allowed to build this calf and became afraid of uncle Robert´s (Moses) reaction upon seeing what they had done; Robert played his part well and got really angry when he saw the golden calf: he threw the ten commandments on the floor and destroyed our entire art work! The excuse the kids gave: it´s all Dorothee´s fault, she seduced us into building this calf!!

So it was a wonderful time, with a great group of kids who really enjoyed nature, the free time in the swimming pool, the good food and all the different games & activities. We are very thankful to God for the time He has given us together. Each one of these teenagers is so precious and it is so worth it to invest in their young lives! We pray that they will have learned some important lessons during camp and that they will make wise choices and live their lives with God.

God bless you!

Caio & Dorothee