Team dinner together

The team got together at the Corbin's house and ate like queen ants and sugar ants as we enjoyed the fellowship and the addition of our spouses and Lisa's mother who brought her delicious chocolate cake to share. Madge and Jean wore their new ant shirts and Angie wore here ant headband to add to the spirit of our fun evening.

Most of us have an ant idenity for the trip but a few people who are not on the VBS work force do not as of yet. However, our fearless team leader, Glen Glover, has now officially joined the ant family on our team, from the looks of this picture he would be related to the crazy ant category!

The Ants Are Busy

Another week, another meeting. That is what our Bible school team jokes about! Today our good friend Belkis blessed us with help with our music for the trip. We made progress on our songs and our Spanish! Thank you, Belkis, for giving of your time so generously! We will do our best to make you proud! We practiced our Ants Go Marching song by marching to the music.

Crazy Ant leads us in the Ants Go Marching...

Happy birthday to our queen ant, Evelyn!

Cissy and Belkis lead us in our songs.

Julie closed our session with a special devotional that meant a lot to us.

The Ants Go Marching to Nicaragua

It's time to give a post about our theme for the Bible School we are planning for Nicaragua. El Ayudante director Bill asked us to please do something that helps build good character and leadership skills. We searched online and found blogs from other churches that have taken teams there and we were able to see that a lot of the obvious things had been done, perhaps even multiple times. So we were thinking and trying to come up with something that we felt had not been done. Bill also told us to "make it fun!" So in our searching, we came across a lesson that had already been translated into Spanish and we started thinking about what it taught and the more we thought, the more we liked it. So our theme was born.

Proverbs 6:6 "Consider the ants, you lazybones, learn from them and be wise". There is a lot of lesson in those simple words. So ants we are! And can we say how much fun we are having developing this lesson? We are all going to be ants, dressed in black pants and tshirts and black aprons. But there are all kinds of different ants, so Evelyn Leachman is our queen ant, Cissy Yarbrough is our soldier ant, Madge Burton is our fire ant, Keith Ward is our carpenter ant, Lisa Norrell is our crazy ant, Jenny Jenkins is our mama ant, Julie Downes is our Sugar ant, Angie Conway and Rowena Ward are our helper ants, Jean Turney is our Leaf Cutter ant, and Betty Corbin is our photographer ant (ok so we took a little poetic license with that last one ! )  and our wonderful ant narrator, Gale Walker.
We have an ant chant, ant games, ant songs, and ant crafts. When Bill said to make it fun, we have taken it to heart! Photos will follow soon and we look forward to sharing our ant stories with you!

Team Work Day

Saturday we gathered as a team to do a work project at our own church. We painted the foyer and hall of our new annex and had a great time bonding along the way. We taped, scraped, edged, rolled, touched up, and cleaned up! We also painted the office of our new Caring Concerns minister. Here are some pictures. 

We are bound for El Ayudante, Nicaragua!

Our mission team from Auburn United Methodist Church in Auburn, AL will be going to El Ayudante, Nicaragua on April 17-April 24, 2010. There are 19 of us on the team, age ranges from 50+ to 70+ working on several projects. The construction group will be building an outdoor kitchen for women in Nicaragua to help increase their family incomes by selling the food they make. Those working on this project will be Glen Glover, our team leader, with Denver Walker, J. O. Conway, Cecil Yarbrough, and Jim Burton.

Two of our members will be fitting adults in the area of Leon, Nicaragua with reading glasses and sun glasses. Lynn Bell and Jim Worthington have this down to a fine art as they have worked together doing this on previous mission trips.

The remaining 12 members of the team are doing VBS with children. They will be doing a Bible School program at 4 different schools in the Leon area, 100 kids per day for a total of about 400 children. The team members of the VBS work team are Lisa Norrell, Betty Corbin, Angie Conway, Evelyn Leachman, Jean Turney, Gale Walker, Keith Ward, Rowena Ward, Cissy Yarbrough, Jenny Jenkins and serving as the VBS leaders are Madge Burton and Julie Downes. In addition to implementing the 4 VBS programs, these team members will also be delivering care boxes to the poor at a dump site, and working with the 33 orphaned children who live at El Ayudante in various activities . Here is the link to the El Ayudante website for those interested in reading about where we will be staying and working.
http://www.nicamissions.com/
Please pray for our team as we plan and get ready to leave on this journey. We will continue to post updates and invite you to follow along with us here at our blog.

Here are just a few pictures of our VBS team planning sessions so far:

Can you tell we are having fun planning for the kids?!