So much to write, so little time to write about things.
Lets start with today......This morning, I (Dave) helped a Dutch volunteer with his new project which involves using a room in a local church to spend time with some of the addicted people in the community - people mainly addicted to alcohol but also crack cocaine. We provide cheese bread, coffee, art materials, fizzy drink, a guitar and our prescence. This is the first week of the project and it went well. Two ladies attended, one for about 1 hour the other for around 15 minutes. We were able to talk and pray with the first lady who shared about her husband dying and about her mother leaving her alone in te house when she was a child (She is now in her 50s). When she shared about her childhood she cried alot and it really made me think about how many people carry scars with them that affect them throughout their lives, never having the opportunity to talk about them, process them and recieve healing.
The other lady came to paint. She arrived, refused coffee and cheese bread, saying that she wanted to paint a picture. She painted a house, a tree and wrote her name. She was so child-like during the activity (although she is in her 30s) and very focussed which was a completely different side to her that I had never seen before. She normally works for the drug traffickers as a 'watcher', nearly always 'on edge' and also trying to entice people to buy drugs. It was a time of escapism for her that she neeeded. This project provides simple opportunities for people like this and I believe it will grow into something bigger as word gets around.

This afternoon, we did some house visits and walked in the community for a while. The visits were complicated, needing an intervention from God to make a difference in one of the households, which had some involvement in child trafficking as there were many issues that still had not been resolved from a long time ago. Sorry, but I will not post more about that here.

Human traficking is a BIG business and happens everywhere, it seems, but often goes undetected or even ignored as sometimes it has implications on the price of the goods that we buy. I will endevour to write a post about this soon when I have collected my thoughts together a bit more on the subject.