Sucre Part 2

Sucre was a great experience for me, I saw that there is such a real need there like I had not seen in the other places that I have visited in Bolivia. For childrens ministry out in the countryside there is pretty much nothing. Even in churches the children are seen more as a hindrance than a gift from God. From what I have been told childrens ministry consists of them singing a few songs with them and teaching them a bible verse. Which is all well and good, but they are really missing out on the real meat of the gospel.

It seems that it is not just the children that need to be taught it is the teachers also. I was also told that parents dont see the priority of teaching their children in the home, so the teaching that they get on a sunday if any, that will be all for the week. So there is a great need in Sucre and God has really laid on my heart, but this is not a Spanish speaking ministry, it is a Quechua speaking ministry. To learn Quechua it can take up to 7 years, so if Gods has plans for me in this kind of ministry then He is really going to have to provide me with the gift of Quechua because there is no way that I can do it in my own strength.

There was a place in Sucre that I was really impressed by and that was the Christian orphanage. It was a really well organised place that seemed a great place to live. Rather than throwing all the boys together and all the girls together. They seperated them into families, with 10 in a block with boys sleeping in 2 rooms and the girls in another 2 rooms. All of the houses had a lounge, dining room, kitchen and of course bedrooms. They would cook togther and live as a family. Each house had host parents, for what I saw it was a great enviroment for these children to grow up in. They were also getting taught the gospel on a regular basis. But not only that, they could see it being lived out by the staff that work at the orphanage, because they all live there. They have 72 children ranging from 3-18 living there, not all of them are parentless, some of them have come from broken homes where the parents are always drunk or on drugs and totally incapable of look after themselves let alone a child. From what I saw God is using this orphange greatly and I hope and pray that many of the children that come through the doors will at least have heard the gospel and had the seed planted that they will come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour.