“Who is going to love the children?
Who is going to take the children home?”
Sinakekele means “take good care of us” in Zulu. The dream of the organization was planted when Ruth was in her twenties and God gave her a passion for orphans through a song she wrote. Years later she pulled out the lyrics to the song and began taking action. The ministry started as an orphanage and over the years Ruth has expanded it to so many different outreaches throughout the community.
We are so thankful that Ruth got in contact with some World Racers this past fall and that gave us the opportunity to be the first World Race team to partner with Sinakekele! Our team had such a blast and felt so treasured and loved during our time with the ministry. Ruth, Granny Den, Mickey, and everyone else connected to the ministry are some of the hardest working, most selfless people we have ever met. South Africa’s moto is “South Africa is not for sissies.” During our time with them we could tell that they definitely embraced that moto.
One of our biggest tasks for Sinakekele was to organize the garage into a library. Day one of ministry the walls were lined with bookshelves filled with books and the center of the room had loads of boxes filled with books. Our team took shifts throughout the month going through each book to label it, enter it into the computer system, and then organize the bookshelves into categories and place the book accordingly. There were THOUSANDS of books y’all! This was a month long project but we were able to knock that out for them during our time there. The purpose of the library is to reach children in the community and poor college students. On Saturday mornings, we helped run the children’s outreach. The kids from the community come to the garage every Saturday to read library books, watch gospel movies, arts and crafts, play games, and other fun activities. The kids are now able to check out the library books! The library is also aimed towards college students in the community who can’t afford textbooks but can now check them out from the library as well. One of the sweetest memories during that month was during a Saturday morning and one of the little girls from the community pulled out a Cinderella book and read it to me to practice her English.
One of our other big tasks for the month was to take shifts in the orphan nursery. One of their employees hasn’t been able to take a day off in six years and we were able to relieve her of that and give her a two week break. There were two infants and three toddlers in the nursery. There would be moments where I would be holding one kid in each arm and then rocking a baby with one foot and kicking a little ball at another kid with the other foot and I totally felt like I could be a mom with a million kids and rule the world… then there would be other moments when they would all be crying over nothing and I just wanted to cry too. I accidently put a few diapers on backwards, but overall I learned a lot through that and the Lord was showing me how He loves them and how He sees them through His eyes.
A few other tasks we did were lead bible studies for the grannies in the community, put together care packages and deliver them throughout the community, delivered care packages to mothers with newborn babies and kiddos in pediatrics. John 21:25 “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I supposed the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
