Day Eight - Friday 9th June

I'm seemingly writing several posts in one go. Friday was not very full in terms of activities but we enjoyed ourselves. We started the day by clearing up their playground which borders the house. It is open to the public but CCM maintain it. However there was a lot of litter, broken glass and tall grass which needed to be cleared. It's still not done and perhaps another day we will come back to it. However working in the sun and heat makes you faint quite quickly. The rest of the day was taken up with seminars. On Thursday we saw some new arrivals from the US fly in, Pastor Ted Tripp and his wife Margie, who are staying just next door to use for a week and giving a variety of seminars to the church, the housemothers and to the seminary that the church runs (which begins next week).

Pastor Tripp has written a book called"Shepharding a child's heart" which basically takes the view that all behaviour from children is an outflow from whats in their heart. Therefore instead of always trying to tackle certain behaviours with either threats or rewards, we should tackle the root causes of their behaviour - the attitudes of their hearts. We can force them to say sorry to not fight, to share etc but this is merely an outward act and doesn't change anything. However what they were not saying was that you take away consequences from a child but rather you apply them in a way that the child will think about the spirtual nature of their problem and that you will try and help them deal with that by praying for them.

So Pastor & Mrs Tripp did 3 seminars on Friday - an Introduction, one on Consequences and one on Communication with the children. We were allowed to sit in and they were very interesting. However we unfortunately will miss the practical application on Saturday as we are down the church working. The House mothers particularly seem to desire this as they are having to look after 12 children at times which are not their own and they often don't have so much time to attend to all of them, and they have the worry that dealing with one child could cause jealously among the others. They are also concerned about getting certain behaviours to stop immediately (tackling the behaviour as there are house rules). Its interesting to see what practical points Pastor Tripp and his wife will have for them. However its a little unerving for me as I'm going to have to do my devotion in front of them next week.

Their seminars took up most of the day. Richard came round to do some fixing of the cupboards and also sat in on one of the seminars with me and Becci. We stopped for breaks inbetween. Then after the seminars the three of us played with the children until dusk in the playground. The girls have particularly taken to Richard which is nice to see, given some of their backgrounds with males. They love to have him carry them, go down the slides with them, push them on the swings and hold them on his shoulders whilst they swing on the monkey bars. One tiny girl called Cherry Joy (aged 2-3 I think) has become particulary attached to Richard, clinging on to him wherever he goes and wanting always to be carried. Richard seems rather fond of her too! All in all a pleasant evening although they got hold of our cameras again, made the batteries flat, again, and both Becci and I ended up with around 100 interesting looking photos (many of which we deleted later), again. We're thinking we might need to be a bit firmer in the future!

Take care. Sarah