So much has happened in this very short month. If I tried to make a blog that covered it all, it would take too long to share it all so I will give a brief overview.
Typical Monday – Thursday schedule:
6 – wake up
6:30 – morning walk
7 – devotional time
8 – breakfast
9 – morning ministry (walking 30min to a nearby village to do house visits)
1 – lunch
2:30 – afternoon ministry (weeding, digging, manual labor)
4:30 – free time
5 – team time
6 – dinner and then free time until whenever we decide to go to bed
Friday and Saturday were rest/adventure days.
Sunday:
10 – Bible Study
11 – church
1:30 or whenever church is over – lunch
2:30ish – cleanup
3 – free time
6 – dinner
7 – team time
8 – combined worship with both teams
Highlights:
- Rejoining my team
- Hiking across the beautiful Malea lea Valley to see a waterfall
- Attending church for the first time in Africa
- Singing songs, reading Scripture, sharing stories, testimonies, and prayer requests with a family we would visit again later to play card games and have a Bible study. Also, two of them, Emily and Gift, stopped by to play card games a few times. They said our visits inspired them to come back to church and several of them showed up Sunday.
- Learning how to make a traditional corn snack
- Making fat cakes while playing music and card games
- Cooking a traditional meal of sorghum and beans. While we waited for it to cook, we chatted, played Crazy 8’s, learned a popular stick game and danced with the shepherds.
- Spending a treasurer day in Maseru getting to know Jessica L. better
- Participating in an overnight prayer vigil and staying up to watch the sunrise even though my shift was only 2-4 and the sunrise wasn’t until 5:30.
- Celebrating Tessa’s birthday. Our hosts helped make it a lot of fun.
- Dancing for an hour and only stopping because I had no energy left
- Dancing for the church the next morning
- Worship with both teams and the Africa for Jesus staff
- Chickens in the bedroom
- Filling lots of sandbags with dirt
- Singing songs and talking while weeding corn fields
- Many, many card games and practical jokes
- Watching another sunrise
- Prayer walk to three schools where we shared Scripture, sang songs, and prayed with all the students
This has been my favorite month so far. Our hosts went above and beyond to make us feel welcomed and like part of the ministry and hanging out with their boys was so much fun. Our translator is the best and made ministry quite amusing at times. But the best part of this month was how much I heard God and how much healing He has brought – some of which I didn’t even realize needed to happen. That part of the story will have to wait for another blog but it will show up eventually because God is just amazing. He blew my mind with His goodness and now I want to tell everyone.
