MK Stories

Missionary kids (MKs) write about some of their experiences living in South Asia.

My First Christmas in Bangladesh

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By Samantha Neely*, age 9

     It was Christmas Eve, everyone was excited.  My mom, sisters, dad and brother and I had put up lights and stockings.  Then, the fun part: the tree!!  We put red and gold balls on it with Santa and snowmen ornaments.  We even put pictures of me and my sisters and brother when we were really little.  Sadly, it was time to go to sleep.  We were going to Thailand on December 26, the day after Christmas.  We had already had our present-opening time.  It was awesome.  But the best part of our day didn’t have anything to do with our presents….

     For Christmas we had decided to give a gift to some of the millions of poor people that live around us.  First we went to pick up 440 meal packets of cooked rice and chicken.  We sat in the restaurant and watched men make the food in giant pots, and scoop it into the packets.  We loaded up our van and headed out for a slum and started handing out the food.   At first all was perfect, until they opened the boxes.  Before you could say “Merry Christmas, Jesus loves you,” people started swarming around our car.  I was scared.  I tried to cover the boxes so you couldn’t see all the food.  It was so sad.  They were so desperate and hungry.  The women pushed the kids, and the men pushed the women.  We were also trying to give the book of Luke with each box, and my job was to put a book with each box.  But when things got really crazy; I just kept trying to cover up the food.

     Abigail, my little sister, and Stephen, my little brother, were both crying. The people were making the car shake.  My mom said to my dad, “they are going to break the window!”  So my dad shut all the windows, and I’m happy to say no hands got crushed.  We started inching our way forward, but 20 people were in front of us.  We couldn’t get away.  We sat for a minute, and then the strangest thing happened.  A rickshaw pulled between our car and the people.  He made a way for us to drive away.   Later that night, my dad said, “that man might have been an angel.”

     So now we still had at least 200 packets!!  My mom said, “What will we do??”  So, my dad drove us to another poor neighborhood and out to an open field.  We started taking the packets out of the car, like crazy fast!!!!!!!!!  We could see people running towards us.  A couple of girls got there first, and we gave them six packets each, with a handful of books of Luke.  We said “Merry Christmas” in Bangla, which is “Shubo Boro Din!  It is kind of neat; “boro” means big and “din” means day – so Bengali people call Christmas the “Big Day”!!  We left the rest of the food packets in the field and drove away before the whole neighborhood ran up and started to help themselves.  We said a prayer that they would get to know JESUS. And really have a very Shubo Boro Din!!

 

*Name changed for security reasons.

Samantha Neely is a missionary kid in the South Asia region.

Easter Helping Hands

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By Charity Neely*, age 10

One day in Bangladesh, Easter Day actually, my family went with a church group of Bangladeshis to a slum in our city.  A few days before, a cooking stove had been left on by accident and a fire broke out while most everyone went off to work.  The fire destroyed all their things, including their houses.  In our big city, this was actually a pretty small slum, but still there were 18 families who had lost everything.  Theses people were very poor.  They did not have insurance like most people in America.  And the government here does not help people when things like this happen.  These 18 families had no way to replace what they had lost in the fire. 

The church we went with provided food and clothing for all 18 families.  We also gave each family a Bible in Bangla.  The pastor told the people that we were there because we love Jesus and because Jesus cares about them.  The pastor also told them the Gospel and about the Easter resurrection story. The people were very thankful, and they brought us a pitcher of water to drink.  It was super hot (it is really, really hot here for six months out of the year!).  We really needed a drink, but we didn’t know where the water came from.  We were so thirsty we drank it anyway.  Thank God we didn’t get sick!! 

While we were there, we saw a man who had been burned in the fire.   His neck and back was all blistered.  When we saw this, one of the people from the church went out and got him some medicine to treat his burns.

Please pray for the people of this slum, that because of what they received that day, they may learn to trust God and accept Jesus as their Lord.

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*Name changed for security reasons.

Charity Neely is a Missionary Kid in the South Asia region.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY:
How children celebrate birthdays in India

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By Evelyn Hunter*

My name is Evelyn. I live in India and I just turned six years old. If you are one or if you are three or at any age, you will still have a good birthday in India. On their birthdays, children wear “coloured” clothes to school instead of their uniforms. This year I wore a pink skirt and shirt with matching bangles (twelve sparkling, metal bracelets) and a new necklace. Everything I wore was new. Children are so excited to wear even new shoes and hair accessories and sometimes a purse!

On my birthday, I got to be the first in line. I took a bag of candy and gave a sweet to each of my fifty-four classmates, my teachers, principles and other workers at the school. When I gave Mrs. Moses, the principle, a sweet, she gave me a nice bookmark. My class sang “Happy Birthday” to me.

Birthdays, not Christmas, are the big celebration in India. Sometimes larger dinner parties are held with catered or home-cooked Indian food like biryani (spicy fried rice) with different gravies, tasty vegetable dishes or mutton (goat) or chicken. At the birthday party a balloon filled with lots of confetti, is held above the children and popped. The children scream with glee as the shinny confetti sprinkles into their hair and down to the ground. When the guests leave, the birthday child gives them a sweet, or piece of candy. The Indian children wait until after the guest leave to open their presents.

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*Name changed for security purposes.

Evelyn Hunter is an MK in the South Asia region.

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