Provision by Ami Spencer

Last Thursday night when I got home from church I had a sweet surprise wanting on my doorstep…. 3 boxes with over 200 kids yoplait yogurts. (Thanks Brennan and Mariajose!) We brought half of them with us on Friday to the kids in the terminal and treated them to a snack after we did homework. I know their resources are limited and water isn’t super accessible, but watching them stick there dirty little fingers in the yogurt to scoop it out, we quickly realized there was a need for a new lesson theme. So on Sunday when we went to visit them again we came prepared to teach them all about GERMS!

We printed some gross looking germ coloring pages off the internet, grabbed the rest of the yogurts out of the fridge and dug out the the box of hotel soaps I had from mission teams in the past. Willy did us the favor of acting out a story of a mischievous little boy who spent his morning running around the streets, playing soldiers with his buddies, playing catch with a stray dog, building castles in the sand and a few other little-boy type adventures. When his mom called him home for snack Willy was certain his hands were clean because he couldn’t SEE any dirt on his hands, but when the kids pulled out there “magnifying glasses” and looked at Willy’s hands we could see that they were covered with germs and bacteria that would end up in his tummy if he ate his snack without washing his hands. The kids all agreed it would be much, much easier for Willy to wash his hands than to have to deal with going to the doctor and taking medicine to get them out of his stomach.

After the kids learned a little about germs and how easy it is to protect ourselves against them by not putting dirty things in our mouths and washing our hands they each got to color their nasty germs. When they were finished we gave them each a bar of soap and told them to take their pictures to put by the sink or pila or bucket of water they had to remind them to wash their hands before they eat. When they came back and showed us their sparkely clean hands they were rewarded with yogurt and a spoon to fill their bellies with something good. One little boy even washed his face with the soap and water, and I almost didn’t recognize him when he came back!

It’s a sweet thing to see the way that God provides for this ministry and his kids. This isn’t the first time either. Twice now there has been a gentleman who occasionally goes to the terminal to buy supplies, he’s not even from the city, he comes from some town a ways away. Both times that he has seen us there he has come up to us and told us he’d like to buy a snack for the kids and asks how many are there with us. A few minutes later he’s back with a bag of around 20 little packs of cookies and juice, and coke and crackers for us. He doesn’t even know us, but God has used him to bless us and the kids!