Christmas packages

I am part of the Operation Christmas Child team in Bosnia and for the 2025-2026 season, we decided it was the best plan for all of Bosnia Herzegovina to take a one year break from receiving packages. So, I only had myself to blame for not having our normal quota of "shoebox packages" to give out while performing our Christmas Plays for our sponsored children...

But praise the Lord, we had a mix of donations from all over - from other organisations, local donors, and even a special collection at our little church. So all of our 80 sponsored families received a package of food and hygiene items, a bag of new clothing in different sizes and one huge bag of sweets for the kids. 

It was a bit harder to organise how we would be able to give it all out, but just seeing the smile on the children's faces makes it all worth it!

 

Drama Club and Christmas Plays

This year was the 10th time I have run a "Drama Club" (above, starting the process reading our parts out loud for the first time) and rehearsed for our Christmas plays with children/teens from our sponsorship project. The 4th time with this group. They are all becoming such good actors, but I pushed them this year as we had the fewest amount of rehearsals ever... 

{We started later than ever due to my travel schedule and then I had to cancel one rehearsal because a LOT of snow fell through the night before... and as I have to go collect 5 of the kids from the top of a very high hill with very steep roads that do not get cleaned quickly... I decided that it was not the wisest move trying to get up there! (I did it last winter once and discovered what traction control is! So wasn't keen on repeating that experience!)}

The story is one I wrote back in 2018 for my other group of kids, and so I just took that script and rewrote it for this group. And despite the lack of rehearsals, they still did amazing and I am so proud of them!!

Indian Christmas Eve

In December 2024, we decided to hold a special Christmas Eve celebration for our International students (mostly Indians). They are in Banja Luka studying Medicine in a special program in English just for them. And 55 International students came along despite heavy snowfall the day of the party. It was complete chaos as we had two teams cooking in the church, and of course it became a competition! And we didn't get the smell of the spices out of the church until February! 

In 2025, we decided to do it again! We learnt our lesson and just had one group of students cooking at their own home, with my wonderful colleague, Graham, making sure they kept to time. And Carolyn and Kate made flatbread to make the food go further!

After last time, we weren't scared of the amount of students who might come. And that was a good thing, because this time we had almost 70 students join us!

There was food aplenty - the dish they eat at holidays: chicken biryani. And even though they told me it was "not spicy" it was certainly too spicy for me :) 

We also had a bit of a Christmas program where we sang some carols (below) and Ljilja shared a message about whose birthday we were celebrating (and I translated into English). 

These students really lack places they can have community, and so it was great to be able to provide that, as well as share why we celebrate Christmas! 

Volunteer Christmas party

Each year we have a party for our volunteers to celebrate Christmas together. It is an opportunity to celebrate them and all the things they have done during the year with us, and we always have a wonderful time together!! This year we had chilli and baked potatoes, and it was yummy! 

We all had a great time catching up with the goings on at our tables! 

And after out volunteers asking for a long while for t-shirts they can use while volunteering, this was the year we finally got it together to get them made... they are all very happy! 

We really are blessed with wonderful committed volunteers!

In 2025 there were 30 volunteers who gave 1091 volunteer hours. I have to keep track of their hours and it is always so encouraging to see how many hours they have given! Mainly through our projects with children and teens, but also in preparation for events or a twice a year "craft making party" to sort all our supplies and get all the "examples" made for our children's crafts. 

Children's Home "trip around the world"

We have just finished up our an autumn series of "Reading Club" workshops at the Children's Home. We are going "around the world" and learning about different countries each week. Each child has a "passport" to which another country gets added each week - and then the craft is connected to this country.

This was the week we did Finland, and made reindeers, but we also went to Peru and made Llamas and Egypt and become Pharoahs! It has been a fun time! (with a little bit of educational input as well!) 

So, a little aside story - I make the "inserts" for the passports (like for Finland above) and we use an A3 size of blue paper that I have a LOT of from a donation maybe 15 years ago from somewhere. We fold it up and then use it as a little blue notebook to stick our "country inserts" into. We had a meeting for volunteers to give input into our program and they gave us feedback that maybe it would be good to use other colours other than blue as some of the kids didn't want blue.

Well, I searched high and low in Banja Luka and the only A3 paper they had was in white. There was NO coloured A3 paper in the city. I could order it online, but I didn't have the time... But I just think it is so amazing that we actually started doing these passports and notebooks out of the blue paper because it was something I already had - and it seems as if we will have to plan ahead if we want to continue using this same method in the future (when the blue paper runs out!) 

I always put a fun quote on the "name page". In February/March it was "Books are like a garden which you carry in your pocket" - Chinese proverb

And for their "trip around the world" it is Dr Suess: "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."