Clinic #2 - Pictures of Children's Ministry

Our schedule for the clinics and children's ministry team is that we start ministering at 9 a.m. At noon we take a one hour lunch break because some of the smaller, remote churches have to feed us in "shifts". We always have to lock everything up when we go for our break. Today, when I returned from lunch and the front doors of the church were still locked where the children's ministry team was ministering, I found these two boys peering under the door and trying to get in.

These are two of my newest friends, a little girl named Aslan on the left and her brother, Justin on the right. Next to the church where we are ministering is a "precario". A precario is a squatter village with homes made of scrape pieces of metal, wood and so on. The families are very poor. This brother and sister are from the precario. You might notice Justin's very dirty shirt. This is the only shirt he owns he said. Aslan's hair is pulled up into a pony tail, but it is all matted and her "long" pants are actually very "short". Their older sister came in wearing a pair of rubber boots that were two sizes too small. She showed me blisters all over her feet. After I washed her feet and rubbed her blisters with antibiotic ointment, I sent our bus driver out to buy her some new flip flops. I had found out that their Mom & Dad were both drug addicts. Buying sneakers or fancy shoes that could possibly be sold to obtain more drugs was out of the question, but you can't get anything for flip flops!

While we've seen a lot of this in Honduras, this is the first time we had seen this here in Costa Rica. Today, when looking at the building across from the church I noticed a retaining wall with this at the top, broken pieces of bottles to keep anyone even thinking about jumping the wall to steal - away!

Here's the "happy bunch" of kids that greeted us when we returned from our lunch break ready to get down to some serious business. The crowd grew bigger in a rather short of time!

I never did get any last counts from the second and third days of our first clinic. I'll have to get those. This was the second day of our second clinic. Yesterday we had 81 people attend, 24 of which accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and 30% indicated that they would like a Pastoral visit! (While we provide free medical clinics, we expect that the churches that host us will place a high priority on following up those people that we serve). Today, we had 135 people, so I can't wait to hear how many of those might have made a decision to follow Jesus too. Tomorrow is our last day at this location and we have three more clinics to go before the team leaves! Please continue to keep us in your prayers!