Registered Slum Survivor Event
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Church Name:
Billericay Baptist Church, Essex
Church Contact:
Gary Bott
Pre event info
When was the Slum Survivor event?
26th - 28th October
What type of Slum Survivor event was it?
We held a Slum Survivor Weekend
How many people got involved?
Over 20...
Post event info:
What happened?
On the 26th of October around 20 of our Young People joined with some from Christ Church to take part in a national initiative called Slum Survivor
The aim of the event is to highlight the plight of over 1 billion people worldwide who live in Slums surviving on less than 50p per day. The facts on these Slums are laid bare for everyone to see, nearly 10% of Slum children die before they reach the age of 5 years, 40% of Slum children are malnourished, only 20% of families have access to piped water!
Our Slum experience commenced on the Friday night when we were given some donated materials to build our Slums with. These consisted of pallets, carpet, tarpaulin, newspaper and even some nice bamboo blinds! Everyone did very well and before long we had 4 rather nice slums in the car park. Task 2 was dinner and our 50p budget wouldn’t stretch to McDonalds so we settled for a nice meal of Dhal and Rice. For some this turned into runny lentil soup but they soon got the hang of it. Rumour had spread to the local press that there were people living in Slums in Billericay and before long we had a visit from them. I’m not sure the phrase “Trust me I’m a photographer” applies when he’s trying to move a burning fire but photo’s were duly taken and appeared the following week. A fairly un-eventful night ensued apart from the drone of snoring apparently coming from the girl’s Slum!
The next morning we all awoke and had a nice breakfast of... Dhal and Rice followed by some bible study and reflection. Our main task today was to make some footballs from our scrap material and then head over to the park to have a tournament with our friends from the Methodist Slum. Our dwellers did us proud and took the title prize of some perhaps contraband sweets. On our return from the match it appeared that the people who owned the land we build on had bulldozed one of the Slums to make way for some luxury flats and the police had stolen some of our possessions! Everyone rallied round and helped to rebuild the bulldozed slum even managing to build an extension. Luckily the Police had dumped our possessions not so far away so I got my silly hat back.
As we were all settling down for the evening we had a surprise visit from Richard of Children’s Vision International (www.childrensvision.org). Richard and his Wife Jeanene run a series of Children’s homes in Colombia taking in abandoned and abused street children on a daily basis. Richard really put things in perspective telling us that in reality we would have sold our nice pallets and tarpaulin to buy food. Our Slums would have been built from rotten wood and scraps of plastic. What Richard had to say then and the following morning with the young people certainly hit our emotions hard and really made us think. It’s certainly distressing to hear things first hand.
Saturday night was thankfully another mild night and I think we all slept well. By Sunday morning not everyone was quite so enthused about Dhal and Rice for breakfast but I felt the 6x spice one went down very well. At this point I guess I should apologise for the smell of smoke and sweaty people during the service along with my dubious taste in trousers! Following the service we had our first rain all weekend, just in time for us to dismantle our Slums!
A very big thank you goes not only to the leaders involved but also to the young people for sticking it out and even giving up their mobile phones for the weekend!!!
Pete Turner
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