Soul Action: Slum Survivor

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St Peters Baptist Church, worcester...

Church name: St Peters Baptist Church Youth Group, Worcester

Contact: Ruth Brown

What type of Slum Survivor event will it be?
We're holding an Original Slum Survivor Weekend!

When is your Slum Survivor event?
11th - 12th October

How many people do you hope to get involved?
We hope there will be about 20 of us...

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Get a free copy of the latest Soul Action resource, a DVD with loads of video sessions and a CD ROM with all new Slum Survivor guides and ideas!
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Post event info...

On the 10th to the 12th of October, 13 young people at St Peter's Baptist Church in Worcester stepped out in faith and did an event called Slum survivor.  The aim of Slum Survivor is to raise money and awareness for a billion people in the world who are homeless, There are no less than 1 billion of the world’s population who live in poverty so slum survivor is about trying to change this.
 
I think that a lot of us went along thinking it would just be quite a fun weekend sleeping out in the stars with our mates, which is definitely how it started off. The Friday night was a lot of fun. We arrived at the church car park at 4pm and started building our slums. After a novelty meal of rice and lentils we played charades and then went to bed feeling quite cheerful. However, we woke up on the Saturday quite tired, cold and achey.
 
We still tried to keep our heads up and got out of bed ready for a new day. Unfortunately, the rice and lentils didn't taste nearly as good for breakfast. Some of us only ate it because we knew we would need the energy. Soon after breakfast we made our way down to the park where we had a challenge to build a football out of newspaper and carrier bags. That was quite fun but we got back to discover one of our slums had been totally flattened. Two of our leaders, Tim and Paul had demolished it and we were furious. Tim explained to us that this is exactly how life can be for people living in slums and it really humbled us. Fancy finding all that hard work totally wasted after going for some water or food.
 
From then on the day was hard. We did some work weeding around the all weather pitch next to our church and some tempers started flaring up. People were tired, smelly, hungry and angry with each other. The leaders kept giving us some perspective though and we kept going, trying to remember why we were doing it.
 
That evening after dinner we had some worship and another bible study (we'd had one each morning and evening). It calmed us all down and helped us focus again. By the end of that day we had grown a lot closer together and come to appreciate so much of what we take for granted. We are so ignorant sometimes.
 
The hardest thing we felt about Slum Survivor was remembering why we were putting myself ourselves out of our comfort zone. There were several times when we felt like giving up and going home, like when the slum was destroyed, or when the lentils and rice made us feel sick, or when we lost our tempers with other people. These times really challenged each of us and we feel God really helped us persevere and remember the one billion people we were doing this for. It was a big reality check.
 
The most enjoyable thing about Slum survivor was the way that it strengthened the friendships with everyone in the youth group. Living in slum conditions for two days is extremely hard emotionally and physically, so we found that we needed people to talk to and make us laugh. We made friends with people we'd never really spoken to before and saw everyone in a different light. Even the leaders joined in and showed us that they are no different, just older!
 
Slum survivor was a real reality check which really challenged usand made us think about people living in poverty for the first time. Now we really can empathise and we've realised how tough living in a slum is and we only experienced it for two days! We hope the money we’ve raised from Slum Survivor can really make a difference to those people’s lives and we're so grateful to our leaders, Ruth, Tim J, Paul, Tim B, Andy, Steve and Lucy for making it happen. We feel alive!

No Slumber

There are millions of children around the world who live in homes without adults. Spend a whole night learning more about the choices these children face each day.
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register your event...

Fill out this form to let us know what you are planning and when. We'll put a page up on our site about your event and you'll be able to add pictures and movies too!
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GO BACK TO Your slum survivor pages...

Check out who's doing what around the country in 08 and 09 by seeing the groups who've registered to take part and organise their very own Slum Survivor events!
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Life on the streets...

Around the world 100 million children live on the streets. Spend a day or weekend facing challenges and raising awareness of the lives of these young people.
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Check out the gallery from the Slum Survivor event at St Peter's Baptist Church, worcester...

Just click on one of the images and launch the slideshow!