80 Days in America

Today was another impressive day. We went with many schoolbusses to the streets of Brooklyn to pick up kids for saturday-sunday school, a cool child program in the church. Meeting all those kids was really touching. In my first busride a small girl sat down next to me. Although she had never met me before, she immediately gave me with a big hug. I think she was about seven years old. We talked for a while. At a certain moment she showed me the last numbers that called her cellphone. “This is my fathers number”, she said. On her cell phone I read ‘unavailable’, what means that her father calls her without showing his number. That really made me think. She probably didn’t understand it, because she was still so young. I found the situation really descriptive for the situation of probably a lot of these kids, that one or both parents are unavailable for their kids.

I met a lot of children from all over Brooklyn during the the multiple busrides through the day and also had the opportunity to take a lot of nice pictures of them. I’ll upload them a later time, because we almost have no internet here and when we have connection, it’s really slow. But that doesn’t care me so much, because these days are really about more important things. This ministry teaches the kids a lot of important lessons like for example todays topic, the importance of choosing the right friends. For these kids lessons like that can change their future.

The last busrides were more exhausting, because there were about 70 kids in the bus and it’s a really hard job to keep them calm for about half an hour. Although you don’t know the background of these kids, you can tell they have a tough life by the way they behave. One girl told me that she was walking on the street the other day with her mum and that they saw a dead body covered with blood of a man that had been shot. Things like that happen here in Brooklyn, that is the situation where these kids grow up. I find it fantastic that this ministry can bring light in the life of these kids and that it really has the potential to change some of their lives. Like I wrote yesterday, traveling was fun, but these are the days that really rock my world!

P.S. Since I didn’t had internet the last couple of days, I just uploaded more stories at the same time, so if you want to read more, you can click here to see the list of my recent stories.