All you campers out there know how important a daily routine is for managing your time well under canvas . When our teams have headed to the High Atlas mountains of Morocco, or the Sinai Desert for an untented endurance fund-raising trek, there too it's the routine that is so much at the heart of each day's success.
And so it is at the orphanage .. good old fashioned order and routine ...
The children have a very clear daily regimen taking them right through from the early morning 'entertainment' music I spoke about in my 'Molten mistake' post after night 6, through washing, morning prayers, breakfast, lessons at school, lunch, play/rest, supper, study, evening prayers and finally sleep. They need it ... just like I do. Without it would be chaos.
News from the current team also shows the vital place of routine for them too. They've done so brilliantly well so far in large part because of routine. There's no older leader to tell them what to do, so it's all had to come from within and from a willingness to force a routine upon themselves that they could so easily have chosen to avoid.
Here's an example of what I mean. Teenagers seem genetically modified not to manage well in the morning - hence long lie-ins until lunch. If they wanted they could do that at the orphanage too - no 'staff' would get them up. But they haven't. Instead they've set themselves a daily routine of being up before breakfast for an early morning hour of painting in the new dining hall.
The extra hours have meant they've been able to achieve what at first they never thought they'd manage ... it was a huge job. I'll try and show you some before/after pics in a future post.
I thank Jayaraj and his team for the order and routine of life he's gifted to those children and for the security and peace it's brought out of terribly troubled pasts.
Maybe today's the day to click here to make a donation?
No comments:
Post a Comment