March 2

This afternoon we went into one of the communities that ARK works in.  It’s one of the smaller ones, I don’t know exactly how many people are in it, but it’s only street – most of the communities that ARK comes into are smaller, because they like to go where there aren’t any organizations in yet, they’re mostly in the really huge slums.  So we went in, and split the kids there into girls and boys.  We took the girls into their little Buddhist temple thing, and led a bible study with them there.  We told them about how God loves them, and they are special, even when people tell them that they aren’t.  We also got them to write on a piece of paper questions that they had, or what they were feeling, so that they could figure out what they were going to do in future bible studies (I’ll tell you a bit about a couple of the girls on the bottom of this).  After the bible study, we went out, and met up with all the boys again.  We played with them for about half an hour or so, and all that they wanted to do was grab our hands and jump with us – to get us to help throw them in the air higher.  It was insane how that was all they needed to be so happy.  These weren’t just 3 year old kids, they were 10 and 12 years old, and all they wanted was to be thrown up and down.
So here’s a story about one of the families in this slum, apparently it’s a pretty common story.  So there’s these 3 sistersp.  All of them have different dads – they live with their mom and Tip’s dad.  Last week their mom had another baby.  Then the day before we came to do the bible study, the mom picked up and left with the baby.  The ARK staff said it was really likely that it was because the baby wasn’t her husbands, but her boyfriends (it’s really common for the wives to have boyfriends on the side, or for the men to have girlfriends on the side).  These girls, when we asked them to write down what they were thinking, or questions that they had, one of them said “I don’t want my mom to leave, I want my mom and dad to be together”.  Another of them said, “Why did my mom throw me away?” 
These are common stories that happen in the slums here in Bangkok, please pray for children like this that have broken families.