The sky is bright blue and there are only a few clouds in the sky. It’s a brisk, windy morning. The cold air slaps your face as you squeeze into the small rental car with your entire team (none of which have bathed in quite some time). Squished together so tight that you can’t easily move your arms or legs, you read from your outline what the agenda is for today. It goes something like this…
Today’s theme is “God’s Love Provides”. Memory verse is Philippians 4:19. Bible story is Exodus 16:2-3, 11-20. All of this is followed by the background, objective, and overview. Once you’ve gone over this, you brain storm with your team about the best way to connect with the twenty children, age eleven that will be in your care. 
You pray, go over today’s craft in your head and an hour’s drive later you enter Mamelodi.
This township/squatter’s camp is nothing like you’ve ever encountered before in your life. There are large mountains dipping and falling way in the distance and as far as the eye can see our tin shacks (shacks is a kind word for them). 
Trying to put what you see into words is nearly impossible. There is nowhere in America like this place. It is pungent with the smell of extreme poverty. You try not to stare at the women in colorful garments carrying logs, bundles and baskets of every shape and size on their heads. Small, children in shorts and mis-matched shirts, run barefoot over broken shards of glass and heaps of stinking trash. Haggard men of every age stand on dusty street corners selling oranges, scarves, glasses, maps of organs and other random stuff. We stare at one another and cringing I wonder what they think of us in our “fancy” car. Vans called convoys zip by honking at every pedestrian in site and there are many. Honking is their way of asking if you need a ride (at a price of course). The streets are made of dirt and chickens freely roam. We pass many shacks with signs for hair salons, surgery, liquor, 24 hour burial etc.
Finally we pull up to a gated and barbed wire fence surrounding a school. Some children are leaning against the brick wall waiting for us. They shyly smile as we pour out of our vehicle and gather our markers, flags, Bibles and other materials needed for the day.
You spend the day telling little ones to get in a line, doing silly dances that you wouldn’t in the past, have been caught doing in a million years (your pride is the first thing to go though). You play games, read from the Bible and then wait for your interpreter to translate. Most of the time you are holding a child’s hands while hugging another little person. By the end of the afternoon you’ve answered questions like, ‘Does Jesus really have a mother?’ and ‘How many celebrities do you live near?’.
Hours later you slowly slump into the car with your tired teammates and grab whatever snack you’ve hidden in your pocket. You are ravenous. Lunch is rice with a bit of meat poured over it and more often then not you end up giving most of your lunch to a child that is still hungry. They are always hungry.
A child in your small group named Trevor asked Jesus into his heart today. You are exhausted but more alive then you’ve ever been.
