Hey everyone!
I cant believe this will be my LAST ministry update! Tomorrow (Monday) is our last ministry day for the entire race. WHAT! It doesn’t feel real. On Tuesday we will pack, and on Wednesday we will make our way to final debrief. We will spend a few days ‘debriefing’ the race, then we fly to America. As I’ve mentioned before, I will be spending some time on the east coast before heading back to Oregon on September 1st.
As you know, my team ‘Team Lightsabers’ has been partnering with an organization called Lightforce International. I want to give you a briefing on what ministry has looked like here since my last update:
Warehouse Clean-out
There’s this giant warehouse on the property that basically had a lot of charcoal.. like A LOT of charcoal, and also a lot of junk in it. We cleaned out the entire warehouse and everything in it (emptied and scrubbed) and moved the charcoal bags to a shed that we built our first week here. Cleaning the warehouse looked like a lot of dirty work, and a lot of killing mice. We are now filling the warehouse with giant bags of maize!
Day of Corn Hell
In the morning our hosts names off different jobs, the number of people he needs, we raise our hands, and thats how the get our job for the day. One evening he said, “who wants a job from hell for tomorrow? I need 7 people.” I raised my hand, and the next day we got up early and had what was probably the most unique day of ministry I’ve had the entire race. We drove an hour out to a field where workers had harvested Maize (corn) and placed it all on huge tarps. They feed it through a machine that breaks the kernels off from the core. We were in the other side of the machine, where kernels, cores, AND full cobs shoot out at us. Our task was to separate the kernels from the core. We were constantly getting pelted by corn. It hurt pretty bad when a fun cob hit you in the shin, or in the side of the head. The kernels didn’t hurt as bad, it felt like an air-soft pellet. We did that all day, and it was hard work. My body hurt the next day in all the places I was hit by corn. But, I’m so glad we got that opportunity because it was so much fun.
Corn After Corn
After we were done with our ‘day of corn hell’ I thought that we were done with corn. Well, I was wrong! At the Lightforce headquarters (where we are staying) the people that stayed behind ended up harvesting more corn. Then, they brought in all of the maize that we had gathered and dumped all of it into this covered area in the center of the compound. It was roughly 150 large bags of maize. Basically, the corn needed to dry out before it was bagged and stored in the warehouse for the year otherwise it would go bad. So, we had giant tarps full of corn that we wrapped up like burritos each night, and opened and spread out each morning. After it was dry, we would shovel it into bags, transport then by wheel barrel to the warehouse, and then put new maize on the tarps and repeat the process.
Kids Ministry
For these last two days of ministry (yesterday and tomorrow) we are putting on games for children from the community. Yesterday we walked around and invited kids to come. We played a ton of different games, danced, and had a short bible story at the end.
God Sighting
Yesterday while we were walking around the community, we met a woman who wasn’t wearing a shirt. She basically said she needed one, but most of us don’t really have shirts to spare (at least now with us). Anyways, my teammate Lauren had a rain jacket around her waist to wear, so she literally gave this woman the shirt off her back. When the woman received the shirt she dropped to her knees and started praising Jesus. It was such a cool thing to witness.
Some of the other things we have done here are:
Planted trees around the compound
Built a goat pen on the compound
Teaching in the Lightforce primary school
Community outreach
Harvesting/planting ground nuts
Sorted and Organized the shop and school supplies
Carried goats from the car to the pen
Put on an assembly for the kids from the school
Chopped goat feed with a manual machine
As far as adventures go, I went on yet another African Safari and it was awesome. On our way to debrief, we also get to go trekking with rhinos so thats pretty awesome!
That concludes our time here at Lightforce! It’s definitely been one of my favorite months of the race.
Thanks for reading!
