Uit de nieuwsbrief van de directeur van Grace Int'l school

GRACE INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL STUDENTS 

MAKING A DIFFERENCE FOR CHILDREN FROM BURMA

"Sports camps, art workshops, Christmas parties, Children's Day celebrations and trips to the zoo.  These are just some of the many fun ways that students from Grace International School in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand have been bringing love in action to children from Burma over the past three years.

One special way that Grace students connect is through the Grace Sports Department's Sports Leadership program.  This program includes students organizing and leading sports camps for underprivileged schools.  For the past three years students have visited a migrant school at Phoppra near Mae Sot, that Partners (one of the seventy plus mission organizations that use Grace International School as a place to educate the children of their missionaries) helps fund.  Each year they have run sports camps and fun activities like face painting, parachute games, water balloon catapulting, glow stick games, t-shirt painting and movies on a big screen.  One year, 8,000 glow sticks were donated for use at one of the camps by an underground church in China by parents of students boarding at Grace!

Matt Coe - the teacher of the 17 Grace Sports Leaders said: "With no street lights, the giant game of capture-the-flag one night using 500 glow sticks was especially brilliant and the screeches of delight from the children made it all the more special. On Sunday the Sports Leaders and the Karen children shared testimonies and worship in their church - a very moving time for all."

Dylan Coe (12 years old) wrote: "When we give the kids a coloring page and some colors they treasure them like I would treasure an X-box or a computer. I have learned that there are people in the world who are not as fortunate as me and so we need to love them and help them."

Pastor Peacefully (the pastor at the migrant school) shared with Matt Coe that he was particularly grateful for the way Matt and the Sports Leaders have mentored his senior students in leadership training over the course of their visits. He constantly marveled at the many and varied ways the foreign students found to have enormous amounts of fun with his students.

Last year the Sports Leaders also ran a very successful sports camp in a Thai village close to the Thai-Burma border. This village is close to a Shan displaced persons camp where some of Partners' Shan work is based. The students were invited back several months later to run the Children's Day celebrations for more than 300 children. The program they ran was so well received by the village and surrounding community that Partners now has greater access to the displaced Shan and are able to deliver more relief supplies, training equipment and trainers into the area than ever before.  (Grace students and their ministry in the region made this greater access possible.)

At Grace International School graduation each year, it is common to hear the senior students speak of how ministering each year in a migrant village or Partners Children's Home is a highlight of their high school years.  This year, one of the graduating students gave this advice: "Don't waste time hanging out at the mall or doing random stuff in your spare time. Instead, make the most of the great opportunities there are, to do things for others. They will be the great memories you will remember long after you have left school.""