On November 1st I came to Swaziland, a small country that neighbor South Africa and Mozambique. Having lived in South Africa as a child, coming back to Southern Africa has been a unique blessing. Its been fun to indulge in familiar foods and drinks and just enjoy the beautiful African scenery. Plus I’ve experienced some incredible and intense summer storms…lots of lightning, wind, rain and even some hail in the last 2 weeks.
My team spent two weeks in Manzini, Swaziland working at a center called Remar. The center opens its doors to anyone and everyone in need, drug addicts, orphans, homeless etc. Remar originally started in Spain and has spread to 64 countries. The Remar in Swaziland houses 120 boys and girls ranging from 5 months to 20 years and has a school that goes through 5th grade.
The first day the director sat down with us and let us know all about the center and its needs. From there we were able to devise plans of what we wanted to do there. Every day I either did an activity or Bible study with the teenage girls, and in the afternoons I would play with little kids, read them stories, hang out with preschoolers, and sometimes teach computer class. Other teammates also helped in various activities such as gardening, helping teachers- since both Amanda and Trish are teachers back home, playing soccer, and create a website for them. www.remarswaziland.org.
Most of the kids at Remar were either orphans or came to the center due to poor home situations. One of the most challenging things about working at Remar was the sense of hopelessness that cripples the kids. So many kids have deep wounds and hurts from past experiences, and lack the drive and opportunity to get a high school and/ or college education and fail to see any way out of their current impoverished lifestyle.
I found it much easier to relate to the younger children because they were not yet stuck in the hopeless rut that so many of the teenage girls seemed to be living in. Many of the older girls already had set opinions and perspectives, and were far more hesitant to open up to us. Despite the difficulty in relating to them, I think the time spent investing in them was well worth it even if we couldn’t see any tangible results. I am confident that we did not pour into them in vain. Swaziland was by far the most difficult goodbye. We didn’t even get 2 full weeks at the center…the time we spent together was brief. It was really the closest relationships I’ve built on the world race.
