"Fall" Festival for the Salamanca Sunday School

Peru, like the US celebrates Halloween. Kids get dressed up, go trick-or-treating, there are costume parties, and stores sell candies and are decorated to some extent for Halloween. It is not something that the Christians here celebrate, and also being the time-frame for celebrating the Reformation, the group of us working in the Salamanca Sunday school, decided to have a Fall Festival, of sorts (although it is Spring here). So on October 29th, we had a festival involving skits, puppets, a clown, even Winnie-the-Pooh, singing, and a bible story. It was a lot of fun!


(Here is the group that helped pull the whole thing together!)

I have found that I enjoy being a bit of a “ham” in front of a group of children (now in front of peers is a different story). The day before the festival, we were getting the skit together, and the guy who was supposed to be a mean wolf in the skit didn’t show up, so for some outrageous reason, I volunteered to be the mean wolf. The outline of the story is that one little girl had a doll, and her doll was her joy, her life. I was the wolf who took joy away from people, and so I took her doll away. The second girl had a ball that was her joy, and once again, I took her ball away. The last girl had Christ who was her joy. Not only could I not take Christ away from her, but I couldn’t even touch her to try to take it away. It was fun, and I had a makeshift costume of all black, but my face make up was my favorite! (Maybe it was real enough that one of my friends had his nephew there and the little child would begin to cry when I looked at him, even when I smiled. oops... I guess I won't be doing too much ministry looking like a wolf!)




To give you more information about the Sunday School in Salamanca, it started after our summer teams came this past summer. One team worked doing a VBS here in Salamanca (where us single girls live). And from there, we started working with the kids here. There is a cell group from another church in Lima that meets in Salamanca, and we are hoping to start a church plant here with that group and with the kids and their families. There are several brothers and sisters in Christ in the area that are helping with the Sunday School, and some are from our church plants that we work with. We split the kids up into 4 different groups according to their ages. I am partnered with a young Peruvian, Lucy, who is from Huaycan, and is an active leader. Our group is from the age of 8-10, and is the largest (and in my opinion: the hardest). Many of the children come from a rough part of Salamanca, and their home lives are hard. Pray for me to love these kids well, as often it can be hard.