mcd's brings smiles to all

I can’t believe it’s the final full day for Julia and Jae. Time is passing too quickly andd our time in India is winding down.  I can’t believe it.   On our walk to the office, we stopped to visit the Missionaries of Charity and Mother Teresa’s old bedroom and her tomb.  I wish I could have met her in person… I can imagine her walking the streets of Kolkata… doing her thing… loving and pouring compassion out on the poor.  Jae and Julia visited Connexions, a vocational training project that teaches and employs women from the slums, to see the project and buy some gifts there.  While Albert continued his work and Grace prepped for the next workshop, Jane and I led YPF for the Pavement Club kids with little to no preparation but thank God things went just fine.  It was actually quite interesting to hear how these kids think and how hopeful and confident they are in their abilities to change their communities.  It’s a refreshing perspective to hear after being immersed in the lives of the adults in their communities who feel so hopeless in their life situation, buried by tradition and culture.

We were continuing our discussions on identity, community, and social responsibility.  We asked the kids to choose a community issue for their small group to focus on.  In one group, they want to clean up the physical trash in their community.  In another to create a drug and alcohol awareness program.  Another to create awareness program on not urinating in random places.  And another group on the mental trash of the community… to transform the thinking of the community… to encourage families to value education and send their children to the existing governemtn schools there… to build up this next generation.  Amazing young people.  These young people are part of the Pavement Club program, a NFE that gets these kids off the streets and give them a basic desire to learn and be educated.   These kids are not attending formal schools but they are being transformed through their participation in EMC’s ministries.  Good kids…

Another teacher workshop this afternoon which went well.  I felt like I was running up and down the stairs, in and out of the workshop, into meetings with different staff and leaders, etc.  somehow squeezed in a meeting on marketing and branding.  my brain is stuffed.. somehow keeping a foot in all the work we’re doing, perhaps not effectively but enough i hope... by God’s grace alone.

A packed final day with the entire team.  We hit up a nice Indian restaurant for dinner, and then ran into Vicken, a street boy that Jane and I had pseudo-befriended a few weeks back.  He's a kid that lives on the street and haggles tourists, aka us, to buy packs of chewing gum from him and begs for money.  A few weeks back we had given him and his buddy some pencils instead.  Anyhow, we ran into Vicken again and took him and his friends to McDonalds for a treat.  I’m not so sure the McD’s staff appreciated us bringing in street kids with raggedy clothes, no shoes, running around in their establishment but whatever.   Sometimes it’s easy to just get frustrated by these kids because they haggle and beg, but once you get to know them, the relationship changes.  We felt like their older siblings.  We found out Vicken is going to a school during the day, but then sells packs of gum after school to help pay for his school fees.  McDonalds brings smiles to kids of all ages all around the world...

It is hard to believe it is time for us to send off 2 of our team members back to the US.  It seems like just yesterday that they arrived.  In fact, it was just like yesterday.  We’ve had a wonderful but packed few days.  The team has just been doing an amazing job, and it is so obvious that it could only be God who recruited this team to be at EMC during this week or two or six.  Just amazing.