Children born into a debt they did not take
Across Punjab, families work the brick kilns against a loan. The loan is advanced, the family works to repay it, and the debt does not shrink. It passes to the children. A child at a kiln is not going to school; they are carrying and stacking beside their parents, and by the time they are old enough to leave, the debt is theirs.
Many of these families are Christian. Almost none of their children can read.
You cannot invite them — you have to go
A Sunday School in a church building is no use to a family that cannot leave the kiln. So the class goes to the kiln. It meets in the open, or in the shade of a wall, on whatever day and hour the families are able.
The first work is never teaching. It is trust. The kiln owner must permit it. The parents must believe that no one is there to take their children or shame them. That takes time, and it takes a worker the families come to know by sight. Only then does anyone open a Bible.
What the class does for a kiln child
It is the only hour in that child’s week when nothing is required of them. No one is counting what they carried. They are told a story, taught a verse in their own language, given something to make with their hands and take away, and told plainly that God made them and loves them.
For a child whose whole life has been valued in bricks, being told they are worth something is not a sentiment. It is new information.
It joins on to the rest of the work
Good Samaritan Ministries has worked for years to free families held in debt slavery at the kilns, and to put Scripture into their hands. The children’s class is not separate from that. A worker who knows a kiln family through their children knows when the family is in danger, when the debt has been raised again, and when a child could be got into school.
Every lesson used at the kilns comes from the same free curriculum used everywhere else — designed from the start to be taught with nothing but paper, a Bible and a willing voice, because at a kiln that is genuinely all there is.
Please pray
Pray for the families still bonded, and for the children carrying a debt that was never theirs. Pray for the workers who go out to the kilns, and for favour with the owners, without which no class can meet at all. If your church would like to stand with this work, please partner with us.