Day 6 - 15.02.26

Today was mostly about getting things ready for the Tearfund part of the trip. Both at home and here in NZ we’d bought items for our sponsored children and also for the centres. I was really keen to get them into their bags, to make sure we had enough items.

We currently have 5 sponsored children, and we are visiting 3 centres and a church on Sunday. Turns out as we’ve gone along buying items for the centres we’ve flicked between the number of centres, the total number of places we will go, and the number of children we have. Anyhow we managed to make up the relevant packs for the centres, and a bonus pack for the church we are going to on Sunday.

There were some items left over that we then distributed into the sponsored childrens packs. I think that we should get some more items that are specific to the individual kids. Some of the photo books are also slightly customised, so we need to get name tags so we can label the bags To ensure we give the correct one total the correct kids. On Tuesday the goal is to finish off the bags so that they are 100% ready to go.

We watched windsor park baptist church online while we filled the photo books. We also created a cover photo for each of the books with a picture of the child, a bible verse, and a photo of us at the bottom.

The couple that I’ve referred to in an earlier post were there again, and I chatted with them a bit when I was on a 7-11 run. I believe their names are Mark and Kirstine. They have been together for 6 years. They have 2 kids, who at the time were with their mother.

As I was heading over to 7-11 I asked if they needed anything. Kirstine was keen to come with me into 7-11 so she could choose things, however I didn’t want to feel pressured to get items etc, so re-iterated that if they told me what they needed then I will bring it to them. I wonder if they have people promise to bring them things, and not follow thru? Kirstine was also very interested in where Christine was, and what she was up to etc. Christine was in the hotel resting, doing some crochet. It was a challenge to explain crochet so I went with Knitting.

Anyhow we settled on a reasonably realistic request. They’d like some bread, some water, some chicken and rice + some wet wipes, so I went across to 7-11 and got those items, and chucked in some Oreo’s and chocolate + lollie bags that we’d made from lollies that we’d brought over from NZ. I popped everything into two seperate reusable bags, and gave it to them. They seemed reasonably pleased with that.

Other than this, not much happened today - relaxed and worked on getting things ready for the coming week, and tomorrow is a big day, with the city tour.

A couple of random pics below

Observations

• Even on an intentional quiet day its hard to ’not do anything’
• The couple that we’ve been interacting with, I wonder if they are sincere, I wonder if what they tell us is true.
  • We have discussed this, and the reality is - does it really matter? Clearly they live on the street, whether or not the details of what they say are factual etc is actually irrelevant.