December Newsletter

Dear Friends,

Joy to the World is what the team wish from Indonesia to all of you. Joy in a dark world full of turmoil. But rejoicing in times when we do not always feel joy is hard. A happy Christmas might be challenging this year because of suffering from stress, economic challenges or illness. Still, He came to the world to bring joy, amidst all the hardship over 2000 years ago and still today.  

In this last week we cried with a little girl from the brickmakers’ community who lost her arm while she was working with the machine to make bricks. So sad. We cried also together with the family of P who, after 5 months of severe illness, passed away last Thursday. In between, we celebrated Christmas joyfully with the whole team. Even in sorrowful times, we can invite God’s joy into our lives, even when we may feel sad or confused.  

Recent Events

COVID-19 and Our Work

We would like to say that the Coronavirus situation is in control here, which is not true at all, but on the other hand it doesn't feel out of control. There is COVID around us but not nearly as much as in many other countries. The amount of testing done is still ridiculously low so really, other than looking at the lives of the people around us, we do not have any real reason to say it is under control. We do not see nor hear of many COVID cases around us or in the communities in our province. (In some other areas of the country it is much worse though). It appears the hospitals are able to handle the number of cases so far so we are thankful for this situation and hope it will not worsen. People are tired of social distancing and wearing masks, and with not much evidence of Corona around, it is hard to be motivated.  

We have been running the kindergarten with two classes two days a week to reduce the number of children coming together (instead of four days with four groups). The children and parents really appreciate we keep teaching. However, the educational development of the students after 9 months of COVID is really slow and we are concerned for the children who have to go to elementary school in July 2021. So, from January 2021 we will change to teaching in two shifts with half an hour in between. This way we can let the children come four times a week for two hours, which we hope will be more effective. We also plan to distribute school packages in January so the children have necessary items to do their homework better. 

The mainstream schools are still just teaching online (already 9 months now) so children really miss face to face schooling. We have been running the after school learning program continuously, given that the children of the same community see each other anyway. They need way more educational support than we can give at this moment. We really hope the schools will open face to face in January 2021.

With hardly any education and a hard economic climate it is also more usual for children to work in the brick factories. The girl who lost her arm is only 14 years old and still in grade 6, she is years behind educationally. She was working many hours with the brick machine which is really no work for a young girl! Now her stepfather wants her sister of 16 to quit school to work in the brick factory.  Also recently a little brother of a child in the preschool drowned in the pond. Pray for protection over the children of our communities and wisdom for what we can do about these matters.  

In the coming week of Christmas we will still do a distribution of food packages for 25 of the poorest families we are linked with. Hopefully that will give them joy in this season. 

We are not running many adult activities nor outings or events. Since they are an essential part of our work it feels like something is missing, so much so that the children of the after school program decided that they would like to organise an online dance competition. The teachers arranged all the different groups to be online last week and they performed their dances. One of the groups was even in tears winning the second prize (just a simple broom and dustpan for the building). It was the attention and small victory that gave them so much joy.  

Junior Servant Leadership Program

One of the programs that brings us a lot of joy is the Junior Servant Leadership program. We have kept on mentoring these young people over the last few months since it is easy to do in small groups.

We were excited to celebrate A’s graduation. She decided five years ago at the camp "Breakthrough" to fight for going to college and it has been a challenging but good road for her. It was lovely to have her at the office. Now she will start a different job for the government and we hope that she can implement new learned values there. We are sure she will keep coming to the Leadership camps. On a practical note it means that we really need new staff for the afterschool learning program with her leaving. 

Last month we went with 22 young leaders for a camping trip to graduate them for their second and third level of leadership. They had to hike up a mountain with 7 waterfalls and had their graduation ceremony with the title "With God it is possible, doable and certain" on top of the mountain. Later at the end of the camp we asked them to write 50 things that they would like to define as the "it" in their life span. Bringing us back to another theme that we often use: think big but stay humble. Their responses about the camp:

"Because it was so hard to climb the mountain and the path was so steep and bad I saw that we were only able to achieve it because we stuck together. We can progress in life as long as we keep moving forward and are sure to face the mountains." 

"I realised I should set goals now in my early years so it will challenge me to chase my dreams."

"I could feel the togetherness and that is very important for me because when we share we can talk about our problems and find solutions."

We felt some doubt before camp whether we should go during COVID times but as a team we felt so reassured and led all the way through the camp. It was a good reminder to stay faithful to our calling to do this work even during COVID times.

Comments

The poor are still among us and we should keep bringing Joy to the World.
We hope you can find ways to do this in your specific country and situation.
We wish you a special Christmas and a good start of 2021 with hopefully a lot of joy!

Greetings from the team