ፍቅር

The theme for the Vacation Bible School at YFC Ethiopia this year is Love, or, in Amharic, the local language, it is ፍቅር. We begin next Monday and the first VBS goes for two weeks with mostly poor kids from the community. All the staff and also some volunteers have been preparing for this all week and the YFC family is full of anticipation for what God is going to do this year.
 Petros and I have been preparing for longer. Neither Petros nor I had experienced VBS with YFC Ethiopia before and so putting together a two week program has been a real challenge.

We've needed lots of conversations with staff who have done this before.

We've spent lots of hours at YFC figuring things out and locating resources.

We've had to meet at the guesthouse outside of office hours

and I've spent many late hours sitting on my bed with my laptop, paper and pencil.

It seems to have taken up lots of my waking hours recently. I am in charge of the English teaching program and formulating the lessons for each class level with four lessons for each group, each week. I thought that was challenge enough, but then there has been putting together the timetable to accommodate those five class groups of different ages and content, Bible lessons, four character development lessons, three visiting 'teachers' with their own specialties, four English lessons per week and coordinated breaks during the morning. I really wished I had my young friend Cam with me to put it together. I know it wouldn't have taken him the 5 hours it took me, but he's 12,000 km away. Hope it works when put to the test next week.

Apart from what Petros and I have been doing, we've met together as a staff to pray, to hand over what we have done, to invite feedback, to decide on classroom rules, to discuss the finer points and what each person's involvement will be.

We've also moved things around to accommodate the five age groups in a small space each and made the library into two smaller rooms by moving bookshelves and other furniture.

People have drawn, cut and pasted signs 

for each classroom to show the rules,

and also made posters for each class

and then stuck them on each door

so the children will know where to go.

  
I have been truly stretched this week and it's not finished yet. English classes still need to be prepared once I have seen if what I have already done is suitable for each age group. Not sure if there'll be any other blog posts this week, but I'd like to show you some VBS next weekend. Let's see how I go.