kids' mish night

our church had a missionary night geared towards kids and i couldn't pass up the opportunity to educate our kids on how life is in the rest of the world and what God is doing there.  i have been working on discussing things here and there because i don't want them to take anything they have for granted.  (it helps that mason's school sponsors two children with their box tops and that his teacher just came back from a missions trip.)

our church has three campuses and this was at the main campus, where we had never been before.  i was expecting an open house style event with countries in each room, but this was a sit down pizza dinner with custom made activity place mats (think airplanes, scripture fill in the blanks, etc.) and ice cream sandwiches.  funny enough the only open seats when we got there (the event was free but we were supposed to bring pencils for the dalit children in india and i forgot so we had to stop at cvs on our way) were at the table with madelyn's sunday school teachers!  we had a nice, quick, meal and then it was time to grab our passports and head off to see the world.  they had little paper passports for the kids to have stamped in each country.

i learned a lot!  matt spent most of the time with manning in the stroller while i went into the rooms with the kids.  our first stop was bulgaria.  the kids like the wooden games and we had a hard time getting them to move on.  the room smelled lovely - of roses.  the missionaries told us that rose oil comes from bulgaria and that it is more expensive than gold!  they asked that we pray for bulgaria every time we smell roses.

playing a chicken feed game in bulgaria

next stop was india.  since the dalit people are a focus ministry for our church (they are not considered 'human' there), this room was one of the largest.  the kids sampled mango juice and candied fennel and we spent a lot of time looking at all of the pictures posted to the walls.  (the people working the room were very busy so we didn't learn quite as much in this room.) the kids were all playing with raw coffee beans and i got a lesson in how the missionaries roast, grind and serve coffee while there - they don't have k-cups.

drinking mango juice in india

checking out items from africa - we all liked the wooden hippos

madelyn's favorite room was mozambique.  our church does a lot there as well and it had another of the large rooms.  the kids learned about how the people have to get their water from a river with lots of crocodiles and that it is very dirty, then the people prayed and God used our church to help bring them clean water to drink.  the man telling the story was very good at speaking on a level the kids would understand only he missed a step - our kids didn't know why they needed to go get their water.  i explained that they didn't have water at their house and then the man understood and explained further that they don't have toilets either and need to go get water to use.  then madelyn got it and realized why it was important to help them.

counting crocodiles in the river in mozambique - madelyn was only off by one which i thought was pretty impressive.

madelyn said she liked mozambique best because they taught her a "thank you, Jesus" song.  i think it was in portugese, but i didn't get to ask. 

we also visited vietnam and china.  matt went in these rooms (so there aren't any pictures) and time ran out so we had to move on to the next part of the evening and they didn't get to do any of the activities either.

at dinner they had divided the room in two and had us start in separate sections of the building.  we started in "the rooms" and the rest of the group started in the "auditorium".  when we finally found the "auditorium" (there are more than one), there was a huge world map on the ground for the kids to run around on.  the guy leading it had them jump between countries, separate by age on different continents, take turns 'swimming' in the oceans, etc.  it was hysterical to watch our kids!  mason went right along with what looked like the most fun, madelyn sometimes was totally stuck because she didn't hear all of the instruction and was trying to speak to the instructor and maddux was totally doing his own thing!  the good news is that they were all having a ton of fun.

maddux - alone in the world

we were there way later than planned (again, i thought it was just open house style and that we could be in and out in an hour - i had somewhere else to be later).  so we didn't finish out the event and had to leave early.  we will definitely do this again if they offer it!  love.