Better late than never, right?

Christmas this year was maybe the craziest of the three I’ve spent here.  This is always the season that is most focused on outreach, but this year it felt like the scale was way ramped up.  Around 30 of my neighbors piled into two cars and a pickup truck to attend our combined Christmas party, held for members of the 6 slum and low-income communities we work in.  The very next day we had our house full of children and then adults, for Christmas songs, stories, crafts and lots of great food.  It was a lot of work, a little bit of chaos, definitely things that could have gone better, but so many people in my slum heard about Jesus and had a great time.  It was exhausting but very rewarding.

From the combined party:

What can I say, my neighbors know how to party!

These are from the party we hosted THE NEXT DAY (did I mention I was exhausted afterwards?) in our house, for just about all 400+ members of our community.

(Above) Even though we had planned and prepared this outreach as a mission team, women from the community showed up and immediately started helping– leading the games, keeping the kids attentive, serving food, cleaning up.  It’s exciting to see how our organizing efforts have really instilled a value for cooperation and community ownership of whatever activies are going on within the slum.

Christy leading (in Thai!) the story of how the candy cane came about, inspired by Jesus’s life and sacrifice.

After the story the kids broke into groups to decorate their own candy canes.

A woman in the community who runs a small restaurant for a living made all the food for us– we just paid her for the ingredients and she volunteered her whole day to make some amazing dishes.  After serving the kids fried rice and sending them home with some small Christmas gifts, the adults streamed in for the feast.  This was a great strategy (which some of the Thai leaders helped enforce) for getting to spend time with some of the adults who stuck around longer, without needing to entertain swarms of kids.

The group of us who hung out longer, sang a few Christmas carols and talked about the meaning of Christmas.  Myself, team leader Kevin, teammate Resty and his two Filipino visitors are in the shot, along with five of my neighbors.