A few hours that make a huge difference

We´ve been busy working at Casa Semear for over a month already now. When I say ´we´, I mean myself and the other team members (Robert, Silvana, Dora and social worker Eliane).

As some of you might have read in our last newsletters, Caio practically stopped working at ABBA and is now working almost full-time for a Christian publishing house in town. So the Casa Semear team is a bit smaller than last year and that means that we also had to lower the number of kids & teenagers that participate in the program. We´re working with a group of 80 kids this year, which still is quite a big group!

 

Just to explain Caio´s job a bit better: he´s working for Vida Nova, one of the biggest, Christian publishing houses here in Brazil, for six hours a day. At the moment he does a lot of correction work of books that have just been translated into Portuguese. In the future he would like to also work on the translation of books from English into Portuguese. He works in his own time, at home as a volunteer. 

As many of you might know by now, Caio loves books and theology, so up ´till now he is really enjoying his new job. Besides the work for Vida Nova, he is still involved with ABBA too. He helps out at Casa Semear on Thursdays and every now and then he´s busy doing PR work, speaking in local churches on behalf of ABBA and developing new video material to promote ABBA.

We´re back with all the different activities at the community center and for me that means that I´m busy doing the SuperWoman program for the teen girls, giving English classes on Fridays and developing & teaching different, fun kinds of arts & crafts. Besides the animal key rings, which we´ve been producing at Casa Semear for a while already, we´re now also making beautiful, patchwork Christmas balls to hang in the Christmas tree. (One way for you to support project Casa Semear is by buying these handmade arts & crafts products. All resources will be used for the work with the kids). 

Every week we try to come up with a new, fun way of doing arts & crafts for the youngest kids, so they can also spend some time being creative while they get the opportunity to learn new skills, like using a scissors, drawing, gluing, recognizing colors and shapes etc.

Making turtles!

At the beginning of this year, I started the SuperWoman program with the teen girls looking back on 2011: What were good things that happened to you in 2011? The answers given by the girls surprised me and made me well aware of how important our role, the role of Casa Semear, is in their lives! 95% of all the answers had to do with activities of and around community center Casa Semear! When I tried to challenge the girls to think further than just the community center, their reaction was short and clear: besides the things we do at the community center, there is really nothing else going on in our lives that is so great that it would be worth mentioning! The highlights of their year are the SuperWoman meetings, the teen camp in July, the pyjamas party and the Christmas celebration! 

Sometimes we wonder if our presence in this neighborhood, in the lives of these families and kids makes any difference... it seems so little, what we do… those few hours a week that they get to spend at the community center, those few hours that we get to know them, teach them, be there for them... The rest of the week they live in such a negative, destructive environment, a world so full of violence, indifference, dangers, so cold and hard. And many times it seems as if this world they live in has a much stronger impact on their lives than the things they learn and experience in those few hours a week with us at Casa Semear…

But how wonderful is it to see how God uses these few hours a week to influence, to change their lives! These small sparks of love, attention, friendship, harmony and joy do have an impact on these kids´ lives! The huge importance of a smile, a cup of hot coffee with milk, a simple question: How are you doing?, a hug at the end of the day, before they go back home. It´s the small things that make a difference, a huge difference! Even if it doesn´t always look like it, even if we aren´t always aware of it. God wants to use us, how wonderful is that! I pray that He will use me, us, this year to touch and impact the lives of many kids & teenagers. For His honor, not ours… and for His kingdom. 

God bless you!

Love,

Caio & Dot

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