Barb and Gerry (PILAS) are great about keeping in touch with us and sharing updates about the students. Here’s one they sent earlier this week:
Just this morning we met with Olga and her mom to talk about progress and her marks. Her mom couldn’t stop raving about the changes she has seen in Olga and how our program is so different from the program that helped her other daughter years ago. Olga then shared about how she and Laura are the youth leaders in the local church, leading groups of about 10 each. They started attending only about a month ago, after we encouraged them to attend. We had visited a few months ago, as we usually visit the local churches at least once per year to see if it’s a good church to recommend to our Club and PILAS students. This one is a good church, so we told our students to check it out. Lo and behold, the pastor immediately picked up on their leadership skills and their Biblical knowledge and put them in leadership roles within weeks.
Not only that, he started wondering where they learned everything and showed up at Club Connexion in the village 2 weeks ago just to observe all that we do and get to know the program.
They are already a huge example to their community with comments being made by others in their peer groups at church. Olga gave an example of an activity they had to do, and no one really knew how to do it but her. One of the students said to the group, “and this is the value of an education.” WOW!