Christmas celebration Casa Semear – 2011

Next Thursday we will be starting a new year of work at community centre Casa Semear. As a team we took the month of January as holidays, so we´ll start the work in February again, filled with new energy, excitement and vision!

But before we start a new year, I first want to finish 2011 well by showing you some pictures of the Christmas celebration we organized in December. 

The team of community centre Casa Semear

Towards the end of the year, we got in contact with the pastor of a Baptist church near the community centre. We were surprised by his interest in our work and willingness to cooperate with us and help us out with some things we needed. He allowed us to use his church building for our Christmas celebration! Which was great, because as Christmas was coming closer and closer, we were getting quite worried about the location of the party; we were expecting around 200-250 people! Invited to the yearly Christmas celebration are the children who participate in our program & their families… As we have around 90 children participating in the program… well, do the math! That´s a huge group of people! Which really doesn´t fit in the community centre itself, so we needed a different location. A location that couldn´t cost too much, because we really didn´t have any money for this Christmas party. This explains our great excitement when we found out we could use the Baptist church building for free! 

Lots of presents!!

 So it was a wonderful Christmas celebration! The church building was absolutely full of people and the program was a success: the children performed a musical for their parents and relatives; a musical about the Gospel & Christmas, that really explained God´s plan of salvation very clearly. The children were really nervous; because for most of them this was going to be the very first time they were performing something like this on a real stage in front of so many people… But it went really well, everybody was so proud of them!

The musical...

 

The pastor sharing the Gospel

After that, the pastor shared a short message about Christmas and the Gospel; he also invited the parents to come and be a part of this church and participate in their small, home bible study groups. I had made a retrospective video with lots of pictures of the past year; which was received with a lot of attention and excitement. And then finally, we got to the best part of the celebration (according to the children at least ;0): handing out all the Christmas presents! We had managed, again, to find a sponsor for every single child in our program, who had bought several presents for the children, like clothes, shoes and toys. It was a huge party! Some of the sponsors had come to the Christmas celebration and were able to hand the presents to `their´ child themselves, really special! It was wonderful to see all those happy faces and to be able to surprise the children this way! Afterwards, there were snacks & drinks and every family came by the community centre later to pick up a huge food package.

Food packages

It was a wonderful and special Christmas celebration and at the same time it was kind of a goodbye party... because we wouldn´t see the children for about 7 weeks… Holidays! Great… and then again, we really miss the children and are already looking forward to next Thursday!

God bless you!

Caio & Dorothee