"And Now These Three Remain: Faith, Hope and Love. But the Greatest of These is Love." ~ 1 Corinthians 13:13

First week back this school year with a whole ton of new volunteers (from the Claremont Colleges)!  And they're pretty incredible.  The kids seemed to latch onto them almost immediately, and these volunteers, being college students, seemed to remember how to do whatever the kids were working on.  Perfect!

This was also the first week of taking the 4-6th graders up to the computer lab again.  This week they were working on drawing a picture of themselves in Paint, copying it and pasting it into a Word document, and then writing a story about their week, as a form of "autobiography". 

There was ONE day this week where we only had one student show up for the optional homework time.  So I got to help our one student while a pow-wow happened in the background.  It's a good example of what we're doing as an organization: helping with schoolwork, yes, but also creating community and sharing with each other about church, God, life, etc.

 

 

 

Courtesy of Dave Evans.

Now admittedly, the discussion corner didn't last the entire time, and towards the end of our homework help session, we were both getting the tired-crazies... the last math problem was drawing a box of the dimensions that she had already done the complex equations to find.  It took 15 minutes.  But the homework got done!

"Expect to Have Hope Rekindled. Expect Your Prayers to be Answered in Wondrous Ways. The Dry Seasons in Life Do Not Last. The Spring Rains Will Come Again." ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

So all the kids are back!  And they're awesome.  We have kids from Kindergarten through 12th grade.  Among our K-3rd graders, we have one student who is not related to anyone else in the program.  It's a real family affair.

We now have kids taking us up on our optional homework hour every day that we offer it.

Our only struggle in the program as a whole is working around the number of volunteers (pretty low for the past month).  But we've had 4 volunteer trainings in the last 2 weeks, so that number is coming up as we speak!  And last night, one of the founding partners of Pomona Hope and I visited the Pomona/Pitzer College InterVarsity meeting to drum up more volunteers.  If any of you are reading this, I hope you come!  And if our brief intro last night didn't do it, maybe friendly rivalry will: I'm pretty sure we have more Harvey Mudd students volunteering than anyone else.

We have had one other issue: the concern that one of our students has been exposed to a cult.  After taking her out to coffee and seeing what she thought about the cult, and about the idea of hanging out more regularly to study the bible, and checking in with Emily, our Program Director, and Jeff, the Youth Coordinator (since it's technically his territory), I'm starting a high school girls bible study.  The hope is that it will provide the group setting that all the girls need to confide in each other and get whatever support they need, and provide a stronger biblical background to help them make wise decisions.

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