Adventures WorldRace SethBarnes Sponsorship Giving

| by archiveworldraceblogs

You would never know. On the surface, he seems like a perfectly normal, perfectly happy 13-year old boy. His big brown eyes light up when we arrive at the Ocean View Civic Center in Cape Town everyday for the teens club and he converses with us in nearly perfect English. His does not seem to be the stereotypical face of poverty, and yet after talking with him for just a few minutes you learn that there is much more hiding behind the sunny exterior.


Christie and I at the teens club in Cape Town
 
Meet Christie, a boy whom you would never expect to represent the sad statistics of the area in which our team is currently serving in South Africa. Christie has grown up knowing the harsh realities of poverty, HIV and AIDS all too well. Both of his parents have died from AIDS and his younger brother William is now infected with HIV, having contracted the virus when he was an infant from breastfeeding. Thankfully, Christie is not infected – but he still has to deal with his family being turned completely upside down. His older sister is currently locked up in Brazil for drug trafficking. The two boys now live with their grandmother. The crazy thing is I learned all of this while spending five minutes of craft time with him during teens club this week – and he told it to me as if we were discussing the weather. Imagine if AIDS were that “normal” to you.
 
William, Christie’s HIV positive brother

Christie’s story is just one of many that our team has heard this past week as we’ve been serving with Living Hope ministries in Cape Town. The ministry was started as a hospice ten years ago by a pastor and his wife in response to the AIDS epidemic in the area, and has grown to a hospital, home based care, AIDS and drug counseling, job creation programs, a Christian radio station, feeding the homeless and after school programs for kids and teens. After hearing them speak and share heartbreaking story after story, I sat amazed. The place where we’re staying right now, the Team House, is in such a beautiful neighborhood right on the beach. You would never think that these problems existed so close by. In fact, as one staffer pointed out, it’s easy to just drive by those communities altogether. I sat there thinking, what have I “driven by” in my life without doing anything? Yet these two didn’t give us a guilt trip – they gave us inspiration. It’s amazing to see what God can do through just two people with a vision and a heart for showing Jesus to the poor in hopes that they will desire to have a relationship with Him.

My team has spent the past week helping run a kids holiday club in the morning and a teens club in the afternoon for one of the poor neighborhoods in the area, Ocean View. The kids have been such a blessing to us and it’s great to know that they are off the streets and getting at least one hot meal a day. It’s also been great to minister to the full time staff there – Living Hope only hires locals from the communities in which the clubs are run so that the kids have positive role models around them. They all deserve medals for the work they do!
 
More Holiday Club kids

Today we are leaving to spend the next week of our time in South Africa at a campsite called Wortelgat, where we will be counselors at a summer camp for blind teens and adults. I’m sad to leave Cape Town as I LOVE it here, but it’s going to be a whole new experience and I’m ready! After the week we will back with Living Hope to spend our last few days of the month ministering at their health care center. Please pray for Christie, William and for all of the kids we met this week, for the staff at Living Hope and for the campers and staff at Wortelgat that we will soon be meeting. You are all in my prayers as well! God bless!