Wednesday February 6, 2013

OR  AKIVA WORK DAY #1

After a short devotional at our hotel lobby, we started work at a daycare center for underprivileged families.  We were met at the hotel by our contact from Helping Hands Coalition, Sebastien.  He gave us an introduction to what his group does and their passion to help Holocaust survivors.  Described how there were 3 groups of Holocaust survivors.  The first group are jews who were placed in concentration camps.  This group is 99% gone due to death.  The Second group is survivors who were housed in ghettos.  And the third group are those who were forced to abandon their homes and flee.  A large group of these were loaded onto cattle cars, separated from their families, and shipped to places like Siberia.  Currently Sebastien said there were approximately 120,000 remaining survivors in Israel.  They feel like they only have 10 years left to reach these people for Christ before they have all died.  Sebastien also said since so many of these people owed their survival to caring Christian families, they were open to the Gospel.

After arriving at the school we were met by an official of the municipality who explained how the children from the daycare center come from families with a very low income, somewhere in the order of $600.00 per month.  Also after we had been working a while this gentleman came back with the mayor and his wife.  The were very impressed and grateful that we were repainting and cleaning up this school. The children were being kept someplace else to allow us to have the building to ourselves.  The teachers had already moved all of the furniture into the middle of the rooms and placed plastic covers over the bulletin boards.(we have never had that done before!) 

So we attacked the walls with scrapers, paint bushes, rollers and elbow grease.  Sebastien had done an excellent job of having all the materials that we needed available.  We did however send he and Sharon to the local "Home Depot"(not) to get a few more paint colors.  Slowly the room began to take shape.  We stopped for lunch and had Pizza (no Canadian Bacon) and drinks.  Everybody worked hard.  By 2:30 we had enough painted so that Terry and Julie were able to start painting the graphics on the walls in the Kitchen.  Then as more people finished their chores Terry got more people started on other wall graphics.  By 5:00 we were ready to quit for the day.

After getting back to our rooms, we cleaned up and then met at John and Marta's apartment for a delicious meal that they had prepared for us.  We started our Bible study of James tonight, and then home to bed.  We are all hoping that we do not wake up at 3:00am tomorrow.

Below are some pictures of what we worked on today and some of the early results.  Please pray that we have a good nights rest and a fruitful day tomorrow as we finish up on the daycare center, and have a chance to meet the children.