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

SuperWoman: a pyjamas-party & first fruits!

Looking back on the past year of course makes me look back too on the work we did at community center Casa Semear; and one of the first things that comes to mind is the SuperWoman program for teen girls. As many of you might know, in the beginning of 2011 I started a special, weekly program for teen girls; a dynamic, interactive program called SuperWoman, developed by Youth for Christ Holland, which includes all kinds of subjects relevant & interesting to teen girls. Among other things, we talked about family relationships, inner & outer beauty, feelings, talents, friendship, sexuality & boys, our life stories & our future. 

 

We started the year with 20 teens and finished it with 16; even though it wasn´t always a very stable group (sometimes girls would drop out and others would be added to the group), together we managed to create a positive and more importantly, a safe atmosphere. Slowly openness and trust developed, new friendships were created and old ones strengthened. We had great times together, a lot of fun, but also some serious moments and challenging talks. It was great to see how everybody was so excited about it; not just the girls, but I myself would wait anxiously for every next Tuesday! It is such a privilege to be able to invest in these girls´ lives & to share a little bit of my life and experience with them. I really enjoyed it! And I hope so did they…

 

In the last months of the year I specifically invested time in short Bible studies at the beginning of each SuperWoman program. The majority of the girls didn´t really know the gospel yet and only a few of them come from Christian backgrounds. We spent time talking about God as our Creator, our Savior, Father and Lord. We read the Bible together and studied God´s plan of salvation, while I (and the rest of the team) prayed constantly that God would reveal Himself to these girls… I did my very best to get through to them, but I knew very well that it´s God´s Spirit who changes hearts & lives… Oh how I longed to see these girls living their lives for God, how that would change their lives, enrich their lives! What joy and hope would they experience! True joy and true hope, so different from the joy and hope this world has to offer! I would imagine it… and many times I would pray for them with tears in my eyes… how I´ve come to love these girls!!

 

To finish the year together, I had planned a big pajamas-party at the end of November. For weeks I was busy with all the preparations and it turned out to be a huge party! We had so much fun together: only teen girls & the 3 ´aunties´ (Silvana, Dora and me)! We had a very full program: making a photo collage, eating pizza, lots of games, watching a movie, Christmas presents, a pyjamas fashion show, photo session, making Christmas cookies, a luxury breakfast & somewhere in between these things we had to try and get some sleep! ;0)

But the best moment came when Silvana during devotional time explained the gospel once again and 3 or 4 hands were raised with the same question: ´Auntie, I want to know how we can do this: accept Jesus… Because I really need Him in my life!´ Wow! That night 6 girls accepted Jesus into their hearts and lives! We spend time talking to them, praying together & crying out of joy because of what God was doing in their lives! It certainly was the greatest moment of 2011 for me! God hears our prayers and He is able and is ready to transform the lives of these kids who so often are so broken & give them new hope! 

 

In the following weeks we talked a lot more and thought about how to continue this journey together... Some of the girls came with the idea to use 20 minutes of the program on Friday for prayer! Great! So now regularly we have ´time with God´ as they like to call it, where we share things about our lives and pray together. With time I hope that all these girls will feel safe enough to really pray out loud in the group (something that still is new and scary for them right now). Besides this, we´ve done our best to get them into contact with a Baptist church nearby the community center, hoping that they will feel at home and become a part of this local church so that they´ll receive food, friendship and guidance. Things they really need. 

 

 












So 2011 was a great year when it comes to my work with teen girls!
I´m so excited to see what 2012 will bring us...

Dot

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