Today we travelled to a place called Ina’s Village. In this blog I will be explaining who Ina is and what she does, sports and games we played with the kids, crafts that our group helped do with the kids, and personal experiences that I found interesting.
This Village is called Cercadillo, but, our group calls it Ina’s Village. Ina is a former teacher from the Boston area who now lives here as a missionary but instead of standing there and preaching the gospel, she has a different approach on how to lead this village as a whole to Christ. First she has to gain their trust and respect. Then she can lead them to Christ and give them a greater education.
What Ina does is fascinating in my opinion. She runs day camps for kids where they do activities, sports, little games, and crafts. She also has a program where the women in the village meet on certain mornings of the week to sew and make bags and jewelery. She pays them at a fair amount of money for the things that they created and then Ina tries to sell them. Ina has placed multiple water pumps and other facilities that help the village. Ina has plans in the future to allow them to have access to electricity and running water.
Within the first ten minutes of getting to the village the sports group was to take charge and lead an organized game. I am a part of the group. At first we felt overwhelmed because we did not expect this many kids to be there, that or we just didn’t put much thought into it. There must have been at least 60 people! We started by playing a great big game of baseball. As you can tell 60 people for baseball quite a big game, so I gave the kids that were sitting around some frisbees and skipping ropes to give them something to do. At the end we played a game of Blob tag
Just after lunch we did crafts with the kids. The crafts group was time to shine. Everyones task was to make a jellyfish. I helped out a twelve year old boy, his name is Rafael. We took our half of a paper plate and he coloured it with different designs and colours, he even decided to put a happy face on his. We used different strands of strings for its jellyfish tentacles, and put stickers all over it to decorate them. Once we were finished with the crafts Ina gave us little games we could play. I played a little memory game with Rafael where we needed to match the pairs, he was too good at it and got bored easily. Then we failed epically at trying to complete the first level of Tangram.
This village is a batey (the word for a small village in Spanish likely with no running water or electricity). So most of the houses here are made out of tin and wooden siding. In a lot of different villages or sometimes the towns that we teach at, you will likely see kids playing with a tire being pushed really fast with a stick, there is a plastic piece on the stick that keeps the tire straight. I saw kids playing with them at the village so I asked them if I could use the toy that they made. After a few attempts, I was able to get it going. It was balanced and going for so long, I even got it jumping off of rocks and stumps! It was really interesting getting the chance to play with the toy that you see lots of kids play with.
While we were eating our lunch two kids started walking up to where we were eating, you could tell that Ina was about to tell them to go away because they are not allowed to be here while we are eating. They came here to drop two baseball gloves off that I’m guessing they found on the ground. For all I know there could have been a different story behind it, but it was cool to see that they are really trustworthy. Ina has been with this village for about 6 years now and you can tell the difference between kids at this village to kids in others. Kids here are really well behaved and you can tell they respect Ina.
Thanks for listening!
Billy
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