Street kids, a preschool zoo visit and a futsal campeonato

Hey all, this week was easily the most encouraging and best week of my two (eek, how time flies) short months here. I am seeing how it takes time to really establish a ministry and am learning to have patience, realize the limitations of my short time here and take advantage of the time and moments that I have. This week was great as I was very busy and felt like I was meeting lots of people and doing some cool things. On Wednesday I went to a leadership meeting for the ministry that has a service on Sunday nights where I have been attending and is also the ministry through which the soccer ministry I work with is run through. I enjoyed going to that meeting and getting to now some of the leadership better. One of the guys who started the soccer ministry had been in Asia for the past month on a soccer evangelism tour, he took a team of former Brasilian professionals and played against national teams in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand (they won all the games even know their average age was probably in the late 30's. He played professional indoor soccer in the US.

On Thursday I went downtown to work with a ministry for street kids, i was invited by an American missionary friend who is about my age named Tim. We met up with a Brasilian missionary named Caetano who works with a really neat mission that works with street kids, prostitutes, transvestites, drug dealers, drug users, basically all the most marginalized people in society. I am hoping to become more involved with their ministry. On Thursday we mainly worked with the street kids. They are mostly aged 10-16 or so and live on the streets with no family or parents in sight. They live there because they want to not so much because they have no other options. The kids pretty much all had old plastic coke bottles with a glue type substance that they sniffed and the smell of glue was pretty strong in the air, they kids passed around cigarettes from one to the other, it was so hard to see such young kids doing such destructive things. We brought a jump rope, puzzles and various other games and just played with them, talked with them and laughed with them, i think just trying to remind them that they are still kids. They visit the same kids every week and try to encourage them to leave the streets, but most of them just don't want too. I'm excited for the possibilities to work further with this neat ministry.

On friday all my stick shift driving abilities were put to the test as I had to drive an old VW conversion van full of 10 preschoolers and 4 other adults to the Zoo. There are lots of hills in the city, but I am learning to drive more effectively and enjoyed spending time with the kids and was glad to not get lost or stall out. Friday night we had another meeting for our kids camp coming up this week and tomorrow some of us will be going to the camp ground to finish some last minute details to get the place ready for the kids on Thursday (this thursday and friday are holidays here in the city). On Saturday we had a Futsal tournament with 8 teams, mostly of people my age and older. We brought a team with an average age of probably 17 or so and managed to get second place. I know its sounds dumb, but playing soccer well helps me feel like I earn the respect of these kids and am able to reach them more effectively. Perhaps that is all in my head, but whatever the case it was good to get to know some of the "rougher" kids in my neighborhood that would never really come to our community house or any other church activity. I didn't really play at all in our first two games and played kinda poorly when I did. In the last game we started losing 3-0 in about 5 minutes because they had one big guy that kept scoring all their goals. I came into the game and for the rest he didn't score any, I managed two goals of my own and we just fell short of our come back, but I was glad for the experience. One of the guys then came to our house for the Saturday night church service, I think it was the first time he had ever come, so I was really excited for that. Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers I will try to continue to keep you updated. Much love and God bless

here's a few pics you can check out the rest here