Our carepoint was the BEST. My favorite ministry. I hated it at first but the Lord gave me a lot of grace and I grew to love it so much. There was truly never a dull moment. Here are some of my favorite stories from ministry in Africa!
One day we’re just hanging out at the carepoint as usual, and then we see a one year old boy with no pants on, wander where his pants went??? So we look around, find pants with poop on them. Okay, no biggie. THEN we look at the slide and realize that homeboy went down the slide after taking his pants off and streaked it. Awkward, but still, we can handle this. Then we proceed to try to clean the slide with water from a jug. Then all the kids see it and run over to play in the poop water coming out of the slide. We try to stop them, but there’s 7 of us and like 30 of them so that day they just played in poop water and everything was fine.
Another day, this 2 year old boy (we nicknamed him Donald) comes up to the carepoint with his dog (a skinny mutt dog). Everything’s great. Then we look over and Donald has the dog in a head lock and starts choking him?? While scream laughing. Unsure what’s going on. We go over, unsure if we try to separate them or??? I mean he’s 2 but he looks like he’s handling himself. Then he lets the dog go and the dog tries to bite him (of course). So Kyleigh goes to pick up Donald to rescue him from the dog, but apparently he doesn’t want to be rescued?? He starts crying and hitting and bites her, so of course she puts him down. Then he and his dog walk back home while Donald is screaming something in siswati. So we ask an older girl that is standing with us what he said and she says “he’s saying he will come back and kill us and slice our throats”. And that’s the day we got threatened by a two year old. Don’t worry though, he loves us now 🙂
A couple weeks later, Donald (same kid from the dog story) comes to the care point again. Again, everything’s great, he’s playing with the rest of the kids, all is well. Then we see him off by himself in some of the taller grass. One of my teammates goes to check out what’s up because at this point we all know this kid is wild. So she goes out there, and she sees him playing with a machete. No big deal. So of course we take it away from him, and he starts screaming like we just ruined his life because we TOOK A MACHETE FROM A 2 YEAR OLD. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. He also slapped a kid in the face with it, but don’t worry, it was dull.
One day we go to ministry at the carepoint as usual and the boys are with us. So we get to the carepoint and our shepherd, Gabi, tells us that we’re going to visit a homestead that day. We’re visiting a lady that we’ve visited before, a sweet go go (the Swazi term for grandmother) who is 107 years old, and we’re there to help her clean and cook lunch. So we start cleaning her little homestead, we’re taking things out, smashing the bugs, all the things. Then we go to start sweeping. Emily has a little broom that doesn’t have a handle that she’s sweeping with and Blake decides he wants to help, so he finds this little broom looking thing similar to hers and starts helping her sweep. The end of it kind of looks like a weave but we ignore that because it’s Swazi and people make do with what they have, ya know? We also washed dishes with a vegetable sack earlier that day so we didn’t think much of it. So blake is just sweeping away having a grand old time when the granddaughter of the go go comes up. She points to the “broom” Blake is holding and says “what are you doing with that? That is used for an ancient ceremony” and that my friends is the story of the time blake swept with an ancient ceremonial weave.
I hope y’all enjoyed these! I love y’all a lot and can’t wait to tell you more in person!
All the love,
Alley
