Casa Semear: Overview of 2012

Here´s a short video with some pictures of everything that happened at community center Casa Semear during 2012! 

We´re very grateful for everything God did in and through us at Casa Semear and in the hearts of the children, teenagers and families we were able to work with during this year!

All honour to Him!

Picture overview of October & November

Before we celebrate the start of a brand new year, we want to share with you a picture update about our life and work here in São Paulo and everything that has happened during the past few months.

October 2012

The Super Little Ones´ camp-in party

In October it was time for a very special program for our Super Little Ones (a name they themselves came up with for their group of 5-7 year olds). At community center Casa Semear, besides the normal weekly program, every now and then we try to invest some extra time and attention in each of the different age groups, and this time the youngest kids were the lucky ones!

We organized a huge camp-in party at the community center, just for them; two days filled with joy and laughter, a very full program including lots of games, arts and crafts activities, barbecue, watching IceAge4, a photo-shoot and sleeping in real tents!

 

The kids had a wonderful time, although we, aunts and uncles, were totally exhausted by the end of the weekend ;0) But that´s fine, it was absolutely worth it! It was great to see all those happy faces and be able to offer these kids a different environment for a bit; a time to just have fun and to forget for a while about the problems they, although still very young, already face in their lives…

 

Social Awareness Day

The 27th of October was a very special day this year: we organized a new and very well succeeded event at community center Casa Semear. In collaboration with Mackenzie University (one of São Paulo´s public universities), we organized a Social Awareness Day for the community surrounding Casa Semear. 

It was wonderful to see how God provided everything that we needed to run this event; in a quite short period of time we managed to get a number of different volunteers and professionals to come and serve the community in different ways.

 

Together with more than 40 volunteers who came out that day to help us, we were able to offer the community a day filled with fun, advice and health orientation. It was a very busy day, with lawyers, dentists, story tellers, candy floss, social workers, nurses weighing people and measuring their blood pressure, diabetes tests, hairdressers and a lot of fun and games for the children! We had a total of 300 people come to Casa Semear that Saturday, and were very pleased with the results. We would like to turn this into a yearly event and already have a number of ideas for next year.

 

November 2012

Road trip to the beach

In November, we took the SemearKids, group of 8-10 year olds, on a road trip to the beach for a day! Most of them had never seen the sea before, so you can imagine how special this outing was for them! They enjoyed all of it very much: the water, the waves, the sand and the sun.

 

As poor kids who grow up in the slums of a metropole like São Paulo and hardly ever get a chance to leave the concrete jungle, there´s a lot they don´t know or understand about nature and the sea, which resulted in some very funny comments and questions from their part. At a certain moment, Marcus (10 years old) standing at the seashore while running some sand through his hands, asked me: Auntie, did they make this stuff out of sand or cement? When I explained to him that it was sand, but that it hadn´t been made by humans, he looked very puzzled and said: How come it wasn´t made by humans?? But someone made it right? Well, that must have been God then… he concluded.

Little Iara asked me several times that day if she was finally allowed to go back into the swimming pool again… ;0)

Adoption Support Group

Since September, Caio and I have been attending monthly meetings of one of the very few adoption support groups here in São Paulo. We started to participate in these meetings mainly because our psychologist from child services who also did our screening interviews recommended it to us as a way of preparing ourselves better for the arrival of our adoptive baby boy or girl. And I have to say that we´ve really enjoyed these meetings. 

It is really nice to get to know other couples that are in the same phase as we are, with (more or less) the same vision and motivation, and it has been very interesting and useful to share experiences and just talk about the whole subject of adoption. It suddenly turns this whole adoption process into something very real and we can see it helps us in preparing for the arrival of our little one. 

Caio´s work, new opportunities and a study Bible

In the past four months, Caio has been busy doing work for two different Christian publishing houses and besides that, he finished his last classes that were still missing for him to complete his Master in Divinity. His graduation will be in March of 2013!

But he also spent a lot of his time on a new job that God brought to him in a very special way: through one of his theology teachers, he got the chance to participate in writing and revising theological notes and comments for a new study Bible that is going to be published here in Brazil. He was able to work on different Bible books and really enjoyed this great opportunity God gave him! Over the past semester, we´ve been able to clearly see God opening new doors for him, leading him and giving him opportunities to use his gifts and talents in His kingdom.

 

God bless you! Love,

Caio & Dot

Merry Christmas & a Blessed New Year!