The last time I was in Cebu I brought a picture with me to give one of our children, a little girl in our Duterte Home. She has lived at CSC since June, 2011 with her two brothers. They came out of extreme poverty, and have made great strides in our care.
The picture I carried was from a group that sponsors this little one as a part of our Foster Friends program. They contribute a monthly amount to provide care for her as a partner of CSC. We have families and individuals who do so through Foster Friends, and in this case, we have a Kiwanis club who gives love across the ocean.
She was in awe of the picture as I explained who this group of people were to her. I had recently spoken to the group and gave them an update on their sponsored child. What a privledge it was to pass along a picture from them and tell this little girl, "all these people care about you." Her eyes lit up and she held the picture with great care as she scanned the faces of the people who give something of themselves to love her. Here she is proudly displaying the photo with two of her friends.
Every day the children at CSC see people who love them: the auntie helping them dress, the house parent leading devotions and the teacher answering a question. There are many people acting as the hands and feet of Jesus in Cebu. And, there are people all over the world making up those hands and feet along with them. What an honor it was to witness one of our CSC kids getting a glimpse of them.
J-O-Y!
Loving life....and more specifically....hackysacks! :)
Thank you to our visitors for giving every kid their very own hackysack---as you can see, they were eagerly received!
SRA Day!
Last Friday was SRA Day at school! SRA is our reading curriculum so it includes reading, writing, and spelling! We spent the morning having some fun reviewing things the kids had learned in SRA throughout the year. It started off with one student from each level sharing why they like SRA. Then we had a cheer competition. The children were divided into four groups and each group had 10 minutes to create their own cheer about SRA or reading. It was cool to see what they came up with!
After the cheering competition was the spelling contest! The kids took turns writing letters or words on the white board as a review of things they had learned. They also drew pictures that related to some of the themes our classes had studied. Some of the older kids went up and explained how their pictures related to the theme.
The final part of the program involved several presentations by our kids. The Level A students performed sang "The Alphabet Song". Jaime and Pretchy each did a beautiful job sharing poems about reading! Shiela & Rowena sang a duet of "America the Beautiful", a song they learned in one of their reading units. Then three of our Level C students shared stories they had written during class.
Here are some more pictures from our exciting day!
Friends
Friendships are an important part of life at CSC. Although most of our children have siblings at CSC (about two thirds), they all seek out friends in their age group and enjoy hanging out, playing, making music and talking about life. Our kids can easily find friends who have similar backgrounds and can understand and accept what they have gone through in life. Some friendships can go on for several years, depending on how long the children stay at CSC. When a child leaves for adoption there are often sad friends left behind who wonder if they'll ever see them again. In some cases, friendships that began at CSC can pick up later on when children are placed in the same geographical area. Check out a few pictures of friends at CSC:
Movie Night
One of the things we often hear at CSC is laughter, and one of the best places to hear it is during a movie night.
It's hard to organize a trip to the movie theater, so often times staff will gather up a group of kids and setup the projector in the library at the school. The movie night below was a "girl's night out" that Teacher Lindsay organized. However, being the IT guy, I was allowed to attend because I had to setup the screen and projector. :)
The movie was Mr. Popper's Penguins.
It's hard to see much in the video below, but it's really fun to listen to the laughter of the kids.
The Littlest Waveboarder
Waveboarding is the cool thing to do during playtime here at CSC. Lots of the older kids got waveboards for Christmas, but recently more and more of the little kids want to try the waveboards as well. The other day I noticed this little lady trying out her older sister's waveboard in the driveway and I couldn't stop laughing - it was so cute! And she's so good at it!