hello. Been here in Swaziland for a little over two months now… this is my intro to Swazi blog… sorry.. but here’s what a week in the life looks like here:
We live in an AIM base in Nsoko, the poorest region of Swazi. AIM partners with an organization called Hope Chest (or Children’s hope chest?? Not 100% sure) and facilitates “care points” where we do most of our ministry. Among all the care points that are here and in Manzini, the capital of Swazi, 7,000 children are fed a day and poured into by shepherds who are volunteer leaders among the community who have been discipled and raised up as leaders to then raise up a new generation of leaders and eventual shepherds.
My team’s care point is called Anchor Center. Its about a 20 second walk, or 203 steps as counted by MG (264 if you’re abbey..tiny legs) from our team house. We spend all day Tuesday-Friday hanging out with our shepherd, Mfantini. Great guy, wise and kind and really loves the kids and cares for their hearts and has such a desire for them to grow and deeply know the Lord. He’s super odd, makes hanging out and talking really fun. Has cool shoes and likes to walk around reciting random idioms. For some reason really wants to go to Kentucky? We just get to come alongside him and encourage and love the kids.
The beginning of the day we either sit with the pre-schoolers, who go to the preschool at the center, and four other girls who aren’t old enough to go to school but just like to be doing something. These guys are WILD. Literally insane. I’ve never had so much fun with kids who I couldn’t even talk to than I do here. I don’t even have words to explain how weird they are but just imagine 25 ish four and five year-olds who have been raised in a loud and exciting culture dancing and singing and running around. LOVE to hug and sit with you and laugh at you. Running across the tires and helping them play on the monkey bars and making hand shakes are all fan favorites. They have the sweetest faces, biggest personalities, kindest eyes. Get covered in red clay dirt whenever I’m hanging with those guys. ?A lot of days we leave in the mornings and do house visits. We’ve been delivering shoes to different individuals in the community. We walk anywhere from 5 to 45 minutes to get to these homesteads. They usually are a pretty flattened out area with a little fence or sometimes walls of cactuses. Typically there is 2-4 little one room houses either made of stones and sticks or cinderblocks, some used for different things or just individual living spaces for who ever lives on the land. The faces of these sweet people when they receive a pair of shoes is going to be in my head forever. Pure joy and thankfulness. We just hangout mostly and talk about life and laugh a lot and pray. Sometimes people rededicate their life to Christ or tell us about their desire for a spiritual breakthrough or brag on their kids and how their piglets are growing up and maybe offer us some bananas. Anything goes, really, but it’s always something new.
After house visits and a quick lunch break, we’re back at the center and the middle schoolers come after their school lets out. Same deal as the preschoolers but heightened. They’re INSANE insane. Genuinely some of the funniest kids. Some of my favorites are Anele, Snazo, Melesive, and Senzelewe. Mel and Snazo are best friends and run the care point honestly. Anele is kind and cooler than any of us and so fun to hangout with. He has the best smile. Senzelewe’s favorite movies are Black Panther and Camp Rock. He loves to sing the soundtracks, cutest thing ever. Sometimes we have sessions where there’s different curriculum that we help teach and sometimes we literally just sit for hours and talk with them and maybe chase some goats and chickens. So much energy. They’re all amazing singers and dancers. They think our tattoos are the worst thing ever. I laugh so hard watching them and talking to them, I miss them already.
After ministry, my team cooks dinner for the squad every other week with our angel cook, Dolly. If you’re not one of the ones cooking for the night, there’s literally nothing out here but your friends and your thoughts. Common activities for me include; not writing blogs, creating 31 question trivia solely about myself for my team to guess for team time (they loved it by the way), watching a movie with Nicole, sitting in talking on the verandas or in the kitchen or in the hammocks, skateboarding on the street with Abbey and what ever kids follow, walking to the train tracks with MG for no reason (we can never seem to time it right and actually see a train), climbing to the top of the storage containers to watch the sunsets (reallllllllllly good ones here), talking to the Guards, Jabulo and Revelation, visiting Nelly and Sakhile and MZ in the office, playing on the playground with a few kids and watching soccer, sitting by the bonfire every now and then, staring at the stars with my friends, my room of 17 girls screaming random pop songs at the top of our lungs, staying up and cooking biscuits and gravy with the late night crew until 1 am, just to name a few. Some nights the squad has stuff all together, sometimes everyone’s doing their own thing, but we always somehow end up being mostly in the space, soaking up our last days together, family stuff you knowwww.
Saturdays I might go to Leo’s house, a missionary from Holland, and sit on his couches or swim in his pool. He has a great accent, is 6’7 and lends me his favorite books. Kindest man. Maybe I’ll sit around the base and just hangout. Potentially wash some clothes in the buckets in the back. Might end up at one of the little grocery stores about a 10 minute van drive away to get chocolate and grapefruit. Sundays we all go to church, either swazi church 30 ish minutes walk down the road with wild worship and probably great sermons if you know what they’re saying… lasts anywhere from 2-4 hours. Every now and then I’ll end up at the church in Big Bend where our hosts go and lead worship or help with the kids. The afternoon has a squad wide soccer game. VERY competitive. Mondays are kind of the same as Saturdays but David, one of our missionary hosts, holds a writing class (kind of a class… not really…. Maybe like a club I guess) and gives us randoms poem prompts. It’s either really deep or really funny or some odd mix of the two. David and his wife, Jenna, are the absolute BEST. Hands down. Make really good breakfast casseroles and invite you over to watch soccer games… feel like home. The boys go spend Monday nights at Leo’s because they do prison ministry over there on Tuesdays so Monday nights are girls’ nights. This means Zumba classes (which actually got canceled but we tried) or women’s talks by the missionaries or celebrating mother’s day with the missionary moms or playing sardines and signs, random stuff who knows really.
We live in the middle of literal nowhere, surrounded by fields of sugar cane and African brush. Life is incredibly slow. Really dirty, literally all the time. Our backyard is the South African mountains and usually has chickens and goats and cows and the birds you see in Lion King. You see giraffes on the way to the grocery store or on the way home from church. The squad really feels like family and community here is better than ever, partly because we have nothing to do but be with each other and find really odd forms of entertainment (for example, seeing how many different dishes we can make out of flour, butter, and water, and making preying mantises and scorpions fight each other or trying to hide the two kittens we found, maybe even recording our own live action veggie tales). These slow months have been some of my absolute favorite.
Feel right at home with red dirt between my toes.
Never getting used to this
– L
