The Dedication, The Celebration and The Fun Fun fun!

Hi Everyone,

Well, it's back to the Education Center Dedication/Celebration we had last week. The two work teams plus all the B2B staff began working early getting things set up (putting the ribbons around the posts, setting up the benches, getting the food ready and setting up the "fun" tables). We wanted to start promptly at 10 o'clock with different "fun" stations for the children to go to before the actual dedication began. We had a nail polish station, a pipe cleaner station, a coloring book station, a jump rope station and soccer for the older kids and, of course, the swingset all ready for use.
It was a chilly morning but people came out in full force and everyone seemed to be really having a good time. Rachell and myself were the "nail polishers" and we were busy for an hour straight doing children as well as some mothers' hands. The kids LOVED having their nails done. We even had some glitter we put on top of the nails and some little stick-ons that go on the nails too. Many of the boys wanted their nails done too but we told them no - there were soooo many little girls that needed to go first and we were running out of time.

The pipe cleaner station was a big hit also because for the most part, everyone wanted a pair of glasses fashioned out of the pipe cleaners to be made. So for the rest of the day, you could see many, many little children walking around with these colorful pipe cleaner glasses that they were very very proud of. (We'll have a blog tomorrow on some of these delightful little faces!)

Then after an hour of playing, we began the dedication ceremony and right after the dedication we had Nigerian traditional dancers that came to dance for the crowd. It was so much fun to watch the expressions on the faces of most of the Nigerian men, women and children. I would imagine that for most of them, this might have been their very first time to see for themselves some of their own native dancing - and they so thoroughly enjoyed it all. And towards the end of their dancing, they had people from the audience come into the circle and dance with them.

In the picture below, you can see Pastor Bobby Hallyburton from Connelly Springs, N.C. dancing up a storm. I think he rather enjoyed himself, huh Bobby?
After the dancing, came the eating and then we all pitched in and cleaned things up and home we went. A fun-filled day for all!

Hope you enjoyed seeing the pictures of our special day. We'll chat with you soon!

In-joy,

Eileen and Crist