The children's mission started in the late afternoon of Friday 26th July and finished on the Sunday after the chapel service. The theme was 'Jesus is the bread of life', and the memory verse was John 6:35. The days before the mission were spent printing T-shirts, preparing the crafts activities, talks, dramas, songs etc. As we were expecting about six hundred children, the preperation took rather a long time!

T-shirt printing outside the Round House. Liz P did a great job of organising such a mammoth task!

The children waiting for the mission to start. The mission took place in the primary school at Kisiizi hospital.

Martyn and the team teaching the mission theme song, which was the tune of 'blessed is the king who comes' put to the lyrics of 'Jesus is the bread of life'. The children loved the 'na na na' bit, and even when we travelled out to the villages after the mission, we'd come across children who'd still be singing it.

On the Friday we did a treasure hunt with the children, and on the Saturday we had crafts and games sessions. Oly and I were in charge of the paper plate holder craft. There were about a hundred children in each group, and most of them didn't know English, so we had to talk to them through an interpreter. It was a pretty neat experience.

On the Saturday morning, some of the children from Kisiizi primary school put on a dance whilst we waited for everyone to arrive. We were expecting some traditional African music, but instead they danced to 'God is Good' sung by an American from Colarado Springs.

The mission on Saturday stopped at 13:00 for lunch, and then started again at 16:00. Some of us sat outside the Round House, and the closer it got to 4 o clock, the more children would appear, streaming down the hills in their dozens. Liz P led them down to the waterfall to sing songs and get a photo. It was just like watching the Pied Piper at work.

On the Sunday, we had about a thousand children come to the mission, because that was the day we were giving them a free meal and a T shirt. Some of them had walked about 2 hours to get there. The paper plates had run out on the Saturday, so we resorted to making spatula puppets (the spatulas were provided free of charge by Wilkonsons of Stamford).

The spatulas soon ran out, so with another group we made African birds...

...which also ran out, so we changed to making peg banners. The children had a great time waving their banners around.

Then it was time for lunch. The children lined up in the field as we served them bowls containing matoki, goat and soup. It took us about 2 hours to serve all the children, as more came off the streets just for the meal. We estimated there were about 1200 children, and there was lots of jokes made about the feeding of the five thousand which got very old towards the end!

We finished off the mission that evening by handing out the T shirts and crafts that the children had decorated. The next day it was off to Bushara for a rest...