Mission Team to Tumaini Evangelistic Pre & Primary School

This is the second blog concerning the recent mission team from Mauldin United Methodist Church to the school I am currently working with in Tanzania.  This was a first time a team had visited the school since it became a real school.  There is a difference in visiting a preschool and a full fledge school with actual classes going on.  This was also a first for the staff at the school.  The weeks leading up to the team had some rocky moments as the headmaster did not want to give up class time at first.  This is one of those moments where his desire to make the teacher’s like worked in my favor as the teachers all were willing to give up a week of teaching.

But once they got on site everyone was happy to let the VBS program take over the school for the week.  With an actual school we had multiple classrooms so we could split the kids up into groups, easily enough by their class designations with just the two standard classes combining since Standard II is very small.  This allowed a lot more time on each part of the various VBS components to work with each group of kids. 

For example, Crafts got a full hour with each group.  Now what I understand (not the team but me) is that I need to figure out better type crafts for Baby level preschool.  The older kids could do everything they had planned and normally just needed a little direction.  The younger kids need simple crafts.  Fortunately, the person who planned the craft room had an abundance of crafts for each day’s Hero (Daniel, Jonah, Noah and the Good Samaritan).  The group did bring over name tags and the young kids quickly learned that the adult helpers would come by to write their name on the back of their craft so they would just hold up their name tag whenever it was time to do that.  The name tags were great overall though the kids did like breaking their lanyards and then bringing them up for us to fix them.  The knots we would tie to fix breaks would constantly be returned very wet and untied where they would use their teeth to work the knots free.

Some classes filled their time and could have gone longer most days like Music.  We had purchased some musical instruments for the kids to use. The majority were goat bells (bells normally tied around the neck of a goat so it would ward off other animals and make them easier to find.  They make wonderful musical bells for young kids as well.  There were two of the finger pianos, three drums you roll back and forth in your hands and the two balls on a string hit the drum and two xylophones from the states.  Music was the favorite class of the majority of the kids because they got to dance, play with the instruments and learn new songs.  Songs that they are still singing as part of their religion class and morning devotion time.

Story time was the group that had the most work to fill an hour every day.  They got very creative with things like a rainbow parade having the kids walk around the school with colored streamers on Noah day.  It was a great way for the kids to interact with each story since they got to act it out in small groups.  The best parts were the donkey day (Good Samaritan) and how into being the donkey some of the kids were.  The day of Daniel was also interesting because someone on the church’s Peru team had gotten some very lifelike Lion masks which sent the Baby class and some of the Middle to crying.  That allowed us time to get them over their fear of the mask and use the better part of an hour.

Game time was also a big hit.  Especially on balloon animal day.  I was not sure if Michael would ever get free of making replacement animals as some would pop theirs and be back in line with their hand out for a new one.  One of the kids popped someone else’s animal so I took them to get a new one but we had to fight to the door to keep everyone from rushing to get more animals.  They also loved getting to do races, bean bag tosses, first aid on their fellow students as part of Good Samaritan day (you know you have someone from the medical field to come up with that idea).  It was a high energy event every day.

One of the best features of the week doing VBS was that all of the team was fully involved in their rooms.  I personally believe and push this issue that it is best to be in the moment when you come over here.  It is my job to take pictures of you being involved.  Too many times I see people on a mission trip focused on documenting their trip with pictures that they miss chances to just be with the kids.  That robs both the team member and the kids of chances to interact.  Trust me you want to interact with them if you travel over here.  They are going to act like you are superstars and I don’t coach that.  You are wild and exotic to them, with hair on your arms that they will play with for hours.  You all have watches that fascinate them.  Your hair is different from theirs and they want to play with it.  Of all the things our team brings over for our teachers and kids to have fun with during the week, the thing they love the most is spending time with the team members.