Kids' Club

So, as I've mentioned, we started a Kids' Club.
We've been trying to get the kids in some sort of routine and establish discipline. When we started a week ago, the kids were literally running all over Rahab's House at all hours. We kept trying to explain that was not going to work since we have English classes going. But no matter how times we nicely explained it, they would come as early as 7:30 am and take over. We were also trying to figure out a way to get the attention of 25+ children while they are running and screaming all over the roof. Between the awesome girls here, some inspiration from how the children's program in Svay Pak is run and the grace of God, we have figured out a system! We have three rules in Kids' Club: Respect God and His house, Respect Teachers, and Respect Others.
Yesterday, some of the kids decided to ignore the rules and come running in Rahab's early. We finally had to lay down the law.  So, we had to explain that the seven children who chose to ignore rules one and two would not be allowed to participate with us, but they would be more than welcome to come back the next day. So they went home, we had Kids' Club- it was great, had fun, no biggie.
Today, at 9:45 I got a little nervous. There were no kids waiting outside. At 10, we only had four kids. I was beginning to wonder if I had messed things up by sending the kids home. What if they were afraid to come back? But, we started with Kids' Club as planned. We started finger painting on the tile floor practicing the English name for the colors, and talking about Noah's rainbow. About ten minutes into Kids' Club, we had 15 kids. We began adding water to the paint to make it stretch farther. Within another 10 minutes, we had 23 kids with soapy painted water all of the roof. They were having so much fun painting with their feet, their hands, and sliding around.
We were having a blast watching the kids and playing with them and made cleaning up into a game. One of the older girls decided to take charge and remind the kids that they needed to respect God's House, and they needed to do a good job cleaning. The kids were so bent on making sure they followed rule number 1, we had a hard time getting them to stop cleaning so we could play the next game. It was so cute. When we wanted their attention, we yelled in Khmer to three and all the kids raced back to their lines, boys on one side, girls on the other, and went silent. Honestly, you would think we knew exactly what we were doing the whole time...
After talking to some of the kids, they told us they wanted to come to Kids' Club so they wanted to make sure they followed all of the rules so they didn't have to miss out on any of the fun. I can't tell you how much it blessed me to hear how much they want to be here and be with us.
The transformation between last week and this week is unbelievable! We're half way through our second week, and I have to say I think this is going to be a success!