“Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!”

Hello all!!!!

Here we are, another week past in a flash, I really can't even believe that we are in June already, which means there is only a couple of weeks left until the camps, until the new step teams, until Mark comes to visit! Lot's of things to look forward too, a lot of preparation to do, a lot of procrastination to resist. Although, it's not so hard to resist procrastination, when really there isn't even much time for that. Our Project World Cup starts next week, with Brazil's first game - Brazil, I am sure shall come to a stand still, at least that is what I am hoping for!

This past week has been pretty football orientated, and we have been working a lot with the younger boys, the girls have been settling into a comfortable routine of actually turning up, and only fighting a little bit. The boys not so much. On Saturday we took 26 of the young boys (under 15s) to play the Santa Cruz under 15's. What a day! It took us a good three hours to get there, during which time I was getting more and more and more irritated with the boys because I had prepared and brought a rubbish bag with me, so that when they ate their biscuits and what not, they could throw the wrapping out into the rubbish bag, but EVEN if I was sat right next to them on the bus, they would LEAN over me to throw their rubbish out of the window into the street. AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH, what do I need to do to get through to them. I think that eventually they caught on to my subtle hinting ( I am of course joking, I was pretty much red in the face from the yelling) because towards the end of the game (which we successfully lost 5-0) I looked around the area where we were sitting, and it was spotless, not one bit of rubbish on the ground, and then I looked over to where the other boys were sitting, and the ground was covered in the remains of their snacks. I was so very proud of the boys. One of them even offered to take the rubbish bags and take them to the bin. I was BEAMING. I watched him walk over to the bins, and then, watched him walk past them without depositing the rubbish, over to a big pile of rubbish that someone else had dumped onto the side of the road. I then saw him open the rubbish bag, tip it upside down and deposit our rubbish onto this monstrosity of a rubbish pile, in the middle of the road, and skip back to me, with the empty rubbish bag in hand, smiling: " Now we can use this rubbish bag again, on the return journey!" Yep, I am definitely going to have to rethink my strategy, if this is where it's getting us. At least he tried.

On Saturday night we also had a 'BOY's NIGHT', because they demanded it, as we'd had a girls night the week before, which went swimmingly, we played some card-games, had a chocolate fondue type thing, and watched a silly rom-com. The boys night didn't quite go that way. First of all, there weren't any boys to run it. Just me and Hannah, so our planned bonding of the older boys and younger boys didn't really work out. Secondly there were about 26 boys, all who had a lot of energy from the football game earlier, or from waiting for the boys night all week, and they were winding each other up like nothing I've seen, then running to myself or Hannah to tell us about what the other had done, like 4 year olds. We survived the night ( I secretly enjoyed it actually, played Pro Evo 07 or something, played hide and seek in the dark, made about enough popcorn to fill a swimming pool), but not completely unscathed, we had a broken shower head (HOW???), a broken fan (which are precious like gold in this country), a broken broom (again, HOW?) and a couple of broken spirits. The boys ran up to me first thing Sunday morning and asked when we would do it again. That made it all better.

I have been working on helping out a couple of the older boys, one 17 year old who wants to get off the streets because he's finding the temptation of drugs and drink too hard to resist, and he doesn't want to go down that road, he want's to join the military for a little while, so a friend of mine is helping him with that, another boy, 17 again, with a 4 month old little girl, with no way of supporting her, we're trying to convince him to stay in school, and looking into options to help them, and the list goes on. Today we dealt with a fist fight at the football project, which was actually a little scary, but thankfully I didn't have to get in the middle of this one as the boys sorted it out, but it's becoming more and more common, so we are trying to find ways to combat it. Football and violence, how do you separate the two? Seems to be a universal problem. Maybe there is a universal solution. If anyone has any ideas please let me know.

I am aware that the past two weeks have been very football related, but my ministry is going down that road for these weeks, with the World Cup coming along, but it won't be like that forever, I promise, you can keep on reading my blog even if you don't like football! I am still fighting with the sponsorship issue, am still struggling financially, but otherwise things are going almost perfectly. Which is always the way, the calm before the storm. So, I am trying to prepare for the storm, but you can't be prepared for everything. I am not building an underground bunker, so to speak, but I AM stocking up on drinking water (if you don't understand this metaphor, don't worry, it's late, I'm tired, it doesn't make much sense to me either).

Church is going well, we lost our missionary worship band, so are left to do the music on our own, and although I miss the Chã da Cruz teens, the music is actually up to scratch, as long as I keep far far away from it. The kids are turning up for church and even behaving, and the message in the past weeks has been full of hope and encouragement, we also moved space, so now there are fans and we are not all dying of the heat. Although the heat just won't stop, even in this, the winter of Recife (That's just for you Jon!).

I see that my small friends the big ants have come to visit again, and so I have to stomp all over them before I get any peace, even though I know that they are like that magic broom in Fantasia, the more you break them, the more that seem to appear, but I won't get peace of mind until I know that the ones I can see won't be crawling all over my face tonight.

Love to one and All.

God Bless

Your's always

Emma