This month has been hard. Really hard. The Lord has been teaching me so much and our days have been so full that I felt I couldn't even pick what to blog about, then recently realized I hadn't even updated all of you on what it is that we're actually doing for our ministry this month, and we're only two days from leaving! Crazy how time flies.
So, this month we have been in Cape Town, South Africa accompanied by Team Lacham. We arrived on Thursday the 4th after a 30-ish hour train ride and began our ministry here by helping with the last day of a Holiday Club, similar to what we call Vacation Bible School in the states. Apparently we were expected to be in Cape Town about two days earlier, and thus would have been able to help almost all week, but because of travel arrangements,that couldn't happen. T.I.A. (T.I.A.=This is Africa.) That weekend we stayed with host families, which was SUCH a huge blessing and I wish I could write more about them, then Sunday the 7th, we moved into a hostel closer to the location for our main ministry.
For the last 2 & 1/2 weeks we have been working at Fellowship Bible Church Christian School (FBCCS), a public school for children grades K-7 from farming families and squatter camps, most of whom also have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I volunteered to teach the music class, along with a girl from Team Lacham named Sarah, without either of us realizing that that also meant we would be writing, casting, directing, and beginning production of the school's Christmas play, which will be taken over by someone else when we leave. What a surprise that was! Since this is mostly just a briefing, I'll write more about this and all the lessons I've been learning from teaching them at another time.
In addition to our work at FBCCS, we have weekly outreaches on Wednesday nights; soup is cooked at the school, then we take it to one of the surrounding communities, which changes each week, put on a program, and serve the soup and bread to anyone who comes by. The first week we had worship music, two testimonies, and a Gospel message and last week, because mostly only kids were around for the "program" before serving the soup, we had a sing-a-long. During the outreach, Johnny and I felt led by The Lord to prayer walk around the camp, and we eventually ended up talking with many people, inviting them over for soup, and even got to share the Gospel once! Most of the people in the camps speak very little English, so we were thankful that God led us to someone who did well enough to have a conversation. Tonight our outreach will be very similar to the first week's, except we also have a skit planned that summarizes the Fall, man's attempt to reach God on our own, the life and death of Jesus, and how accepting Jesus restores the bond between us (in essence, the Gospel). If you read this in time, please pray for us!
Please know that I deeply desire to keep you all better informed and I'm still just adjusting to life on the field; not having consistent, accessible Internet sometimes makes it difficult to do that. I assure you in the coming weeks I am going to make better effort to stay in contact. I appreciate all of your prayers and support so much 🙂 Keep an eye out for another blog about FBCCS within the next couple days!
Also, I've been told the blog editor is not iPad compatible for pictures 🙁 I'm going to work on getting some pictures on here from someone else's computer, but in the meantime, feel free to add me on Facebook and check out the pictures that have been added on there 🙂
