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!

The past months in pictures

A lot happened in the past three months, by God´s grace we´ve been able to experience many different things. So here are some pictures to update you all in a creative, visual way about our life and work here in São Paulo, Brazil.

June of 2012

SuperWoman program

In June, towards the end of the first semester of the SuperWoman program for teen girls in community center Casa Semear, we organized a special beauty day for the girls.

A long Saturday full of beauty workshops (hair, nails & make-up) and for each teen girl an individual photo shoot with the theme: Believe it, you are beautiful! 

Adoption

On the 12th of June we received a long-expected, super important phone call with some great news: we were approved as adoptive parents by the local authorities of São Paulo. 

This means that we´re on the waiting list for a baby now and that, one certain day, we´ll receive another phone call with the news that we´re going to be a mommy & daddy! Super exciting!

 

Also in June, community center Casa Semear received a big group of teenagers from a church in Texas, USA.

A 12 day long mission trip brought this group of excited young adults to us to help us finish some of the building work and paint the newly build staff house at Casa Semear. We and they, I believe, had a great time! 

Holidays in Holland

A bit later in June we, Caio and I, went on a short holiday trip to Holland and London. It was very good to spend time with our family and friends there and just be away for a bit, relax and regain our energies while enjoying Holland.  

We also went on a short city trip to London in honor of our fifth wedding anniversary which we celebrated last year (05/08/2011).

July of 2012 

Teen camp

In the beginning of July we flew back to São Paulo, well rested and with new strength. As soon as we got back here, we started the preparations for the yearly teen camp of community center Casa Semear which we always plan in July, during winter holidays.

We had some amazing days with a great group of kids during camp. We had lots of fun during the many sport activities and (night) games and a lot of time to really invest in our friendships and trust bonds with these kids. Together we studied and lived through Joseph´s life story and talked much about family relationships and forgiveness. It was a good, special time! 

Spare time...

At home, in our spare time, we´ve been busy improving our office space and creating a creative arts & crafts corner for me (Dot). As Caio is most of his time working at home now for the Christian publishing house, working on text revision, translation and investing in his theology studies, it was about time to improve his office space a little.

Caio´s been busy making a new office table, book shelves and a book case out of used pallets and wooden crates. Here´s the result!

I love to be creative in my spare time and so, when we were in Holland, I bought my very first sewing machine. After reorganizing the office, I now have my own arts & crafts corner where I can spend all my spare hours and relax.

 

August of 2012 

On the 5th of August we celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary! Going through life together and building up a life together has been and will always be a great adventure we both greatly enjoy; we can clearly see God´s guidance, presence and blessing upon our lives and we´re just so thankful to Him for these past years and the future that lies ahead of us!

 

SuperWoman program

In August the SuperWoman program for teen girls started once again for the second semester of this year. I now work with a quite stabile group of around 20 girls between  11 and 15 years old. Every week there is another dynamic, creative and interesting meeting in which we talk about all kinds of interesting topics for teen girls and study the Bible together and seek God in prayer.

It is so encouraging to see how much these girls have grown in the past year; they are a close group with good friendships, trust bonds and openness among each other. In the past couple of weeks we´ve been talking about a woman´s body, sexuality and dating.  

We think it´s very important to talk about these topics with the girls and try to guide them and teach them Biblical principles. Especially when you realize that actually many girls who come from the lower social classes in Brazil get pregnant during their teen years…

September of 2012

Since the beginning of September we have two new family members: Jip & Janneke! Their names refer to a famous children´s book from Holland that is all about the adventures of two little friends named Jip & Janneke.


ABBA staff retreat

Also in September we participated in the yearly staff retreat of our missionary organization ABBA. The retreat consists in a long weekend away with the whole ABBA team (from various different ministries), it´s a time to rest, to seek God together, pray for each other, develop and strengthen friendships and just hang out and have fun. And this time it was even better because my sister, Joseline, and her Brazilian boy friend, Bruno, went along too!

The ABBA team is a great bunch of people, they´re like a second family to us, so we always enjoy it very much to be able to spend a few days with them.

We enjoyed all the free time, the fun during the many games, the camp fire on a lovely, warm evening and all the laughter and jokes involving the costume parties during dinner time...

We are very grateful to God for giving us such great colleagues, friends and brothers & sisters!

God bless you!

 

Caio & Dot

 

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