How We Do the Start of the Year
The start of the school year is always exciting. Most of the students are excited to not be sitting around their house all day and are actually looking forward to heading back to class. Although, we usually give this a few weeks until they want their first vacation! Some things transcend culture.
For us as sponsorship staff, we are tasked with getting around 200 students ready for the start of the year. This means we purchase all their backpacks, school supplies, and two uniforms per student. Then we make sure every student’s backpack is filled with all the supplies they will need for the next couple months and hold parent meetings in all four of our communities. This has been a ton of work but so rewarding, and we have been so blessed to have the help of so many youth this year. We are also always incredibly thankful to have the guidance of Pastor Walter and Claudia. I don’t know what we would do without them!
We recently moved sponsorship offices to another location on the mission base. We had so much help with painting, moving over, and organizing all of our stuff.
One day we were supposed to receive all of our school supplies around 11am so we asked the Sunday School teachers (who had been there since 9am) to stay to help us. We were still waiting for deliveries from the store at 7:15pm when we finally told the youth they should just go home. They stayed with us for over 10 hours to help and kept such great attitudes the entire time! They came back a few days later to help us pack all the backpacks full of school supplies for the students.
We are very grateful for all the help we have had this last month. Our youth are incredible and so eager to help!