April 10-13

This week was short because of the holiday, yet it felt like the longest week so far!!! It felt so long because Monday and Tuesday night we had an extra class to make up for the classes taht we would be missing Thursday afternoon and Friday. We had a speaker named Christine Colby come here from the Kona, Hawaii YWAM base. She's an EXCELLENT teacher and she was very knowledgeable! She basically just filled in the gaps that were left from the other teachers. She helped us to understand what was missing from the other teachings, so I definitley understand community development MUCH better now. We learned alot of basic biblical community development principles this week. Here are a few of them:
~the biggest job of a community development worker is intercession/prayer
~we musn't just go into a community and look at the problems and try to solve them right then and there. We must expose the roots of the problems in order to see true change.
~true change takes time and is based on the value of people!!!
~we learned about paternalism. Which is doing for others what they can do for themselves, or giving to others what they can get for themselves. And this is NOT what we as community development workers want to do. Our desire is to develop them so that they can sustain themselves and multiply their good works, in every aspect of their lives.
~even if the people in a community need something, if they aren't ready to accept it, or they don't see the need for it, it won't do them any good. For example if they are just given a well, and they had no involvement in the building of it and they didn't really invite the idea of having a well, they might not use it, because they won't feel it belongs to them because they had no help in building it and they may not know how to maintain it. They are probably used to how they've been living life without a well.
So there are a few of the things that I've been learning over the last few weeks. We also watched two movies this week which were about community transformation. The first one was LUTHER which is about Martin Luther and what happened when he was trying to reform the catholic church. It was VERY interesting to watch it from a community development workers perspective. Luther tried to change the church, he wasn't going against it, he was trying to work with it to make it better. I really urge you to watch that movie, it's really good. Another one we watched was a transformation video. Some of you may have heard of these. It talks about the transformation that is going on in this world right now. We watched the second one called THE GLORY SPREADS and it was amazing to see all that God is doing in my generation. I urge you to get a hold of those transformation videos, they're amazing.
SO all in all it was a great week. Christine shared many stories about her adventures on the missions field and she really helped me to understand and apply the principles that we've been learning so far in FCD.
In other news, Jermaine is gone to Gambia for his overseas outreach. He left Jamaica early Saturday morning and I think that he's still travelling. Once he gets to Gambia he will have a 15 hour bus ride on the horrible african roads to where he's staying...that should be quite the experience. I'm not sure how much I'll hear from him, but I will update you about him as much as i can. He is coming back around May 2oth i believe. I know that he would really appreciate your prayers as he leads this DTS team in Africa!!! A praise report for him is that he did get all of the money that he needed for this outreach which is something really amazing. It was a few thousand dollars american and he had it all in by the day right before he left, which was cutting it short, but he still got it all in on time! Praise GOD, he doesn't owe a penny! I do miss him already, it wasn't very much time that I got to spend with him in between his local outreach and this outreach, but once he's back from this one he's back for good!!!!
My prayer requests are still the same as the last time I posted them on here, so thanks for your prayers and I know that God is hearing them!
Blessings, Kristen