Thursday, April 3, 2008

Welcome to the GCC India (July - August '08) Team Blog!

Hi there! This blog will track the training and mission of people traveling from Granger Community Church to assist our brothers and sisters in Christ in Tamilnadu, Southern India, during our July - August '08 operational "window". In this window, three teams will be mobilized to aid church planters in a number of Southern Indian villages to do the following:

* Conversational English - In many of the remote villages, there is a significant lack of exposure to conversational English, particularly for the children. Many adults are now being bundled with small children in widespread literacy initiatives, but once the children “grasp” something, it is more easily understood as important or valuable for the adults. This team will spend time with groups of children in a loosely based curriculum to help increase English language skills would be exceptionally well received as a great thing in many of the communities.

* Medical - This team will be trained to do a variety of things in given contexts ranging from providing “health camps” to aiding existing medical teams made up Indian church members to presenting World Relief's HIV/AIDS and “hope at home” basic curriculum, to engaging in “hospital visitation” efforts with local planters or church members.

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Trade/Serving -This team will seek to engage three distinct project areas. First, the team will provide field implementation survey statistics for two villages that have already been prototyping micro-enterprise and micro-loan initiatives through GCC's partnership with Growing Opportunity, Int'l. Second, they will be providing marketing "status" to small start-ups in villages where Indian church members and others are attempting to set-up small business ventures, but need some extra visibility. Finally, this team will do greater research into additional micro-enterprise ventures that may serve church planters, church members, or village members with secondary income generators.

We hope that you will stick with us as we travel and engage the training process along the way!

All for One!
-"Samurai" Jack Magruder

2 comments:

Ryan said...

Hey those kids will love the english conversations. We had so many kids come up to us and say "Hi How is it going!" they laughed histerically when i would use a tamil word like cordai or malai or chapati.

Bonnie said...

I will keep all of you in my prayers. I am so excited for all of you and the goals that you have!Hang in there and be good to one another!
Bonnie