My team was by ourselves this past few weeks at an amazing place in Manzini. We lived at the cow shed which actually was a cow shed done up and turned into a hostel and each day we would travel the 30 minutes to get to Remar.
This was a great facility which housed orphans or children who were abused or neglected by their own families. The house we were mostly at was the girls home, there were also 3 other houses where the boys lived. One of the boys homes was just down the street where the pre-school was held during the day. While the other 2 boys homes were an hours walk away.
During our time at Remar we ran bible studies for the older girls and helped in the schools, face painted the kids, played soccer, watched high school musical on a tiny computer and hugged as many kids as we could.
One of the more memoriable times we had with these children was our very last day where we wanted to show these older girls God’s love in a practical way. Most of the older girls were very hard and it was difficult at first to connect with them but by the time we left, some of them had let their guards down.
So from the very beginning out team planned on trying to reach these teens, to bring them out of their hopeless mindsets and try and build encouragement between them and help them dream about a future.
So Leigh ran bible studies each morning teaching these girls about the love of Christ, she taught them how beautiful God saw each of them, she taught them about the freedom of letting God have all of them. She did such fabulous studies with them that we saw the attitude changes and the girls start seeing each other no longer as enemies but as sisters.
It was incredible to be able to serve these girls, each of my team mates made individual efforts to reach out to their hardened hearts and encourage them.
Our last day we waited for the girls to come down and watch their usual Saturday movie, but for some reason, they seemed to be taking a long time finishing their chores for the day. It was an hour past when we usually start watching movies when we went to see what the problem was, and it wasn’t a problem really, the girls just didn’t want to see us because it was out last day. They all find it hard to make relationships and then just two weeks later we are gone. I understood completely how they felt .
We had a special task we wanted to share with them. Washing their feet. We wanted to show these girls how much we loved them, and how much Christ loved them. Each girl passed through giggling and having a great time and by the end they were all feeling loved. We could see this through the way they started serving each other, painting their nails and making sure they had popcorn.
God is good!
