new sports outreach (our 7th)

our HAN student setting up the warm up
(in 25 degree heat) game!

we currently deliver our sports outreach into 6 different areas including a fruit farm in the elgin valley and last year we were approached by another farm to work with their children. its always hard to balance starting a new club with the greater impact it has on our current sports outreach team, our heart is to bless as many children as possible with this life skills and health awareness based outreach but we need to ensure that anything we do is sustainable, ensuring we are not letting the children down if we have to stop for any reason.

i am glad to say that we felt happy to accept this opportunity to work with this new farm and yesterday we ran the first club there (our 7th club), the site has a large rugby field and some broken netball posts (which we hope to fix to engage the girls in the netball training). the session was led by one of our sports mentors (local young people that we have seen potential in who is now a 'support worker' to the main team) with a HAN student and myself supporting him as he took the children through a simple introductory session. the 10 children who came were aged 13-17 and were very enthusiastic, they will encourage the younger children to come next week to bolster the numbers.

weekly sports planning meeting

after our thursday clubs we have our weekly planning meeting where we discuss how well (or some times not so well) the last week went and we plan the next week of our 40 week programme, we split each group up into the 7 different teams and assigning jobs, from the initial warm up, to the life skill, health talk and bible story. each week has a theme and is linked to a bible verse and life skill application.

this week our meeting was very busy as we were joined to two of our newest sports mentors, from the iraq informal settlement and a couple of older guys who are keen to expand the programme into other areas of grabouw.

it's amazing how God is using us to engage with the children, now over 180, each week, impact their lives with positive messages, providing them with role models and life application skills and sharing God's love with them in a very practical way. as saint francis of assisi was credited with saying....'spread the gospel at all times and use words when nessasary'...this is what we do each and every afternoon and we are so privileged to be able to spend time with these children who come from some of the poorest homes in our community.