• Estonia-Kid Mission-2004
It was the summer of 2004 that I joined a team of thirty-three that went to Tartu, Estonia to build a playgound for children. Pictured here is our team from Whittier Area Community Church, along with some teachers and new friends, who helped at the site.
In one week the playground was completed. It was so nice and all the children loved it.
Although I was part of this construction team, my main role in going was to conduct children’s meeting everyday and train two puppet teams. You know, sharing the Puppet Fever. (Ha)
I had gone to Estonia the year before…
On my first visit to Estonia, in the summer of 2003, involved a smaller team of seven, but we had extensive exposure the churches of the Evangelical Union and it was our purpose to make contacts for return trips. We traveled around most of the country. While I was able to conduct some children’s meetings on this first trip, it was the second trip that was being staged. Since then, our church has maintained an annual relationship with these Union Churches of Estonia, our adopted country.
The “Playground Build” was a partnership with our church and Kids Around the World. They form partnerships with ministries to build playgrounds for children all over the world. It is a wonderful ministry. I easily caught the vision of how effective these playgrounds can be for reaching out to children world wide. Not only does KAW build playgrounds, but they provide an one- week training curriculum for children’s leaders while they build the site. Their training involves a colorful flannel-graph curriculum based upon the Jesus Film for Children. I determined to be involved with this ministry again, if I could.
The second Puppet team that I trained was from Rakevere, Estonia. They have a performing troupe, all from one church, that wanted to add puppetry to their repertoire.
They were very enthusiastic learners and they were fun to train. They picked up puppetry really quick and caught the Puppet Fever too, the leader got it bad.
These are the puppets that were left in Estonia for the teams to use in their outreach programs. Would you imagine that these “beauties” would help with the Puppet Fever? “You got to be liking that!”
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