Hillcrest Service Day

Today the whole of Hillcrest High School had a half day and spent the second half of the day splitting up and going to 4 different child care ministries. I personally went to the one which is made up of kids ages ranging from 12 to 18 called Transition House. All of the boys have been rescued from the streets, fed, educated, and had the gospel shared and made a part of their every day life. The boys are not taken off the streets and put directly into Transition House though, it is called Transition House because they are preparing them to go off and live life away from a ministry. First we all got a tour of the boys’ compound. We were led into tiny bedrooms packed with bunk beds. The next stop was the “kitchen” which was a covered area outside with two fires going and two massive pots on top of the fires with food inside. We were then led across the compound to the “library” which was the size of a small bedroom with hardly any books on the shelves. The last stop before we really got to business was seeing their computer lab. The lab was not much bigger than the library but had about 10-11 new looking computers in it. Out of the 15-20 boys going to serve at Transition House were 3 groups. One group helped some of the boys repaint many areas of the small concrete buildings. Another made bracelets and other little crafts like that with the boys. My group was to play sports with the boys. (Lots of the Nigerian boys were sneaking off from their other activities to come join us.) At first we played soccer, we split into 3 teams of 3 and took turns playing. The games were quite short as to make it so that everyone could play more, we only played until a team scored just 1 goal or until 3 minutes had pasted. To give us American boys a break we played basketball briefly. We used the same system for games except that we played to 6. Not many of the Nigerians are skilled at basketball so the games were short lived. We made multiple attempts at playing basketball but we could never get past 2 or 3 games before kids started hauling the 3x4 soccer goals onto the court along with soccer balls to play soccer again. After we were done with sports we went down to a newly built covered area next to the court and sang praise songs led by probably the oldest of the boys named Timothy. We sang “How Great Is Our God” and “His Love Endures Forever.” Following the music Mr. Abaya came up and gave a small talk on sexual purity. No girls were allowed to come to Transition House because the guys are older there and they want to help them out with their purity as much as they can.

Sterling (15)