You guys I have been on the world race for a whole week now, isn’t that crazy! With such long travel days launch feels like a month ago. But anyways I was in Atlanta for a couple days getting some extra training and saying goodbye to my mom (super-duper hard, many tears were involved). Launch was great, I learned a lot about what to expect this coming year and got some solid advice. We headed to the airport at 1:00 am on Monday morning and had to sit and wait to check in for a couple hours. We had to do a quick prayer over my bag because the weight limit was 50 pounds and mine was pretty close up there, after weighing it, it was exactly 50.0 pounds, praise the lord.
After that we flew to Boston where we had a 15 hour layover. Of course we weren’t going to sit in the airport for that long so we decide to rent a hotel room for a day and put all 42 packs in there and venture out on the town. My team decided to jump on the subway and head to state street where all the historical stuff happened. Wow I didn’t know how pretty Boston was, literally such a beautiful city with so much stuff to do. We walked around admiring the city and we stopped to get lunch which was super good, then we met up with other teams and walked around even more and saw where the Boston Tea Party took place we even decided to pour a little of our own tea in the ocean, we also saw some famous grave stones and other historically famous buildings ( I really couldn’t tell you much about those). After that we jumped back on the subway and took it to our hotel, grabbed our bags and headed to the airport. Of course when we got to the airport we were super early so we had to wait a few hours to check in we kind of just chilled out and relaxed. After checking in and going through security and getting searched ( happens every time I fly) then we grabbed some quick dinner and waited at our gate. Our first flight was 12 hours long and we were flying to Doha, Qatar. The flight wasn’t to bad because I slept for pretty much all of it so there isn’t much to talk about. When we landed we had a pretty quick layover and jumped on our next flight to Johannesburg. That flight was only 9 hours and went by pretty fast because I watched tons of movies.
We were now in South Africa and our hosts picked us up at 4:00 am and we drove about 30 min to our host site. This month we are working with Impact Africa. This organization is really awesome and has a bunch of different ministries that we get to work with. They have a pre-school, an abandoned baby program, teaching in elementary schools, high schools, and doing different types of local outreach. The first few days here we pretty much just rested, got trained, and went to a museum to learn more about the countries history. Today though we got to do our first real ministry, we drove to a squatter camp and did a little children’s program. This place is called Deip Sloot, there are approximately 300,000 people living within a 2 mile radius. The poverty is pretty unreal here and is crazy to think that right down the road is a huge city with plenty of rich people. During our children’s program we got to dance with the kids, play games, do memory verses and just get to love on them. I love working with kids so I was totally in my element. I am very excited for this month and can’t wait it see what’s in my future.
