STAND AS A WITNESS

July 22, 2010 Thursday


Yesterday, Brother Aaron Davis, an aboriginal doctor who is a member of the church, called and said he’d talked to the manager, Jill Call, of the local drug and alcohol abuse center about us volunteering out there. She was willing to have us come out. So out we went (it’s about 5 miles out of town), It sounds interesting. It treats aboriginals who are alcoholics mostly; some use marijuana also. Often, their immediate family comes with them. They stay 3 months. Once they finish they go right back to their prior lifestyle and end up addicted again. But she says there’s nothing nicer than a sober aborigine. Their biggest problem is that while they are in rehab they get really bored. That’s where we come in. We plan to go out for a couple of hours on Friday afternoons to play games with them, take walks, or whatever they want us to do. Simon, one of our aboriginal members, works out there. The name of the place is Milliya Rumarra which means the same as Bran Nu Dae, just in a different language.
Tonight we had YW. Just the two Shires girls came, Carolyn who is 12 and Kerryanne who is 15. I think I’ve mentioned before that they had no idea that YW had a theme and commented that some of the words in it are hard. So today we tackled that concept of “Stand as a Witness.” I had gone through all the YW manuals to find a lesson I could use. There wasn’t one. So yesterday we went to the internet café and got into the church’s website. I searched for something there that I could use. No lesson. I finally happened onto a talk given by Sharon G. Larsen when she was in the YW General Presidency. It was a great talk on the subject, and I was able to turn it into a reasonable lesson. We made “No Bake Cookies” when the girls first got here and then did the lesson while the cookies set up in the fridge. They’d never made them before. The girls seemed to understand the lesson. I’m hoping that Kerryanne especially is grasping what we are teaching. She’s been inactive for about 4 years.
President Robinson came over as we were finishing up. He liked the cookies too and took the recipe home so his wife can make them.