Lebanon Action Team update

Christmas is now coming quickly, decorations from Bourj Hamoud are being put up festive lights are being added and we are excitedly collecting parcels and cards from the post office, thank you to all our family and friends who have sent them. We have felt a bit teary though as it has hit us that we wouldn’t see our families this Christmas, and it seems strange decorating somewhere that isn’t home. However, we are looking forward to many celebrations with the boys, friends in Lebanon and our lovely supervisors.

Saturday we spent a few hours with the boys creating glitter glue. We decided the best style with the boys when it comes to craft is to create a couple of examples then let them use their own creativity. This basically means anything could happen. Today we endured major glitter spillages breaking of Naomi’s very special gold paint pen, carefully helping a boy to turn around and find mayhem has erupted behind you. But the smiling faces of the boys, the ‘thank you sooo much Miss’ many of the results really made it worth.  Many of the boys had created really creative cards one our favourites was a particularly jazzy tree made by Michael (on the left below). We were really touched though by the amount of boys that centred their cards around Jesus we had a lot of glittery crosses, Nativity scenes when asking most boys what they wanted in their card they said, To God Merry Christmas... noo noo God I love you very much!! The one that really surprised us so beautifully is one pictured below. It is by a boy called George. Through this simple card we  just realised what an amazing job Dar el Awlad is doing and how God is touching the hearts of these children.

The next big thing for us wass a worship evening which happened on Sunday evening. We felt it went really smoothly and we  hoped the boys were really able to have fun but worship at the same time. As part of this we brought back Squeak and Jerry (Paul’s puppets) after their successful debut at Shirley Baptist during training, teaching a valuable message about ‘Jesus the most important gift’. This featured much cringe and silly voices, Naomi was embarrassed for days, but we hope this is something we can start to use more regularly to give simple and fun yet essential messages for children.

A highlight of this week was being able to learn some worship songs in our Arabic lesson. After increasingly finding we are missing the English worship back home we really felt we wanted to be able to sing along to some of the Arabic ones.  We are now practicing a couple of lovely songs and in the process of learning their meanings and hoping that soon we will be singing at the top of our voices in church… watch this space!!!

The boys are continuing to give us lots of laughs including the other day when the boys were casually riding their bikes with breadsticks in their mouths like cigarettes in a very James Bondesque way.We are also constantly being challenged Naomi came home the other day ripping her hair out after spending hours trying to teach a little boy who has never been in school before to count to three and, after trying method, the poor boys still can’t count too one.

We also had the pleasure of meeting our regional director, Phil Haliday, who we have to say is a very groovy guy. We enjoyed a great cup of tea and chat with him and hope he has had a very enjoyable time in Lebanon.

Prayers are especially needed for Becca this week who has lost her voice for the second time which she is finding very difficult, especially when working with lots of excitable boys who think its quite funny ( and think she has been playing the flute too much !!)

Thank you for all your continued support. Have a good advent.

Naomi Paul & Becca