Month 3
Streets of Jericho
In Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa there’s a whole week dedicated to high school graduates to party the streets. Surprisingly older people outside of the age group decide to join in with the 18yr olds. This is called the “jbay rage.”
You might have heard of this before aka “beach week”, basically this is a time for teens who are just getting out of school to go to clubs and be a distraction for others. Many times there’s an awful lot of people who are either drunk or on drugs stumbling around the streets and apparently it’s pretty dangerous to be around.
Our ministry host said that there’s an group of people who help get women off the streets and home safely. Most of the girls and I were intrigued by helping others so we asked our ministry host how we could help. Long story short we decided to go out 2 nights of the week and our goal was to help the group that sets up every year. They basically told us they didn’t need our help so we took things in to our own hands and walked around the only block that was lighten up in town and prayed. We prayed for the streets,we prayed for people who were driving, anyone. A story in the Bible called the walls of Jericho, was something brought up to us by our squad leader.I had never heard it before but once I got the gist of the story it made what we were doing feel relatable. The background of that story in the Bible is the Israelites walked around the walls for several days. Joshua has commanded his people to blow their trumpets and rams horns until the walls fell. We didn’t use any instruments in our scenario but we did walk those streets more than 7 times using the power of prayer to keep others in gods presence and hopefully out of harm. This ministry started at 6pm to about 12am on the 2 nights we did this and there wasn’t much that came from it but there were a few people we got to spread the love of the lord to. It doesn’t matter if they remember the group of 20 girls walking in a single file line and praying aloud it only matters if they met Jesus that night.
Month 4
Dunamis
Not only was this ministry the hardest out of the bunch but it was the one I saw the most fruit come from. Dunamis is a home for girls who have survived sex trafficking along with sexual assault more than 100s of times a week. When we arrived to this site there were a few houses built, 3 for the owners of the property, 2 for the girls living there, a open field (where the 30 of us stayed in tents for the duration of 10 days) and a construction site that will be a guest house for world racers like my self one day. We arrived to dunamis the week of Christmas and stayed through the holidays until January 1st.
Staying in tents wasn’t as awful as it seemed I mean of course there were nights where it was freezing cold, bugs, and laying sideways of a mountain does something to your face waking up in the morning (it’s not pretty). When we arrived I felt like most of the squad had a pretty good attitude about it but as the week went along people started getting sick and moods changed due to being away from home and not being able to talk to our families from the lack of wifi. But the ministry was pretty great! In the morning we went to a street down the mountain and went to houses to get the children living in that side of town and just dance with them. It sounds so weird thinking about a bunch of Americans knocking on your door asking for your kids to come play with them but people here just don’t really care. Anyway we would turn music on for the kids and just have dance parties,play a game of soccer, and just love on them. Usually we got back to the house around 12:30pm and had lunch then started construction work on the guest house. Although both ministries were great they took a toll on most of us. It was definitely an exhausting 10 days I can say got for sure. Spending Christmas away from my family was probably the hardest thing I’ve done on the race.I really enjoyed being with my squad but nothing aches more in my heart being away from my family than that day. Obviously I got trough it but since then I have had homesickness more than usual. Holidays are just hard. New Years was a blast though I really enjoyed staying up late and having a New Years party with the whole squad it was definitely such a night to remember. Over the span of 10 days we helped build the foundation of a house that one day hopefully someone else appreciates, we loved on some kids which I pray that we set a good example of Christ for them because god only knows much they need it, and we made so many close connections with the owners of the property. All in all it was as good as month four gets.
