My team left Pretoria on Monday with another team (Fierce Pursuit) to travel about five hours to our new location in South Africa. We are living and serving at an orphanage that houses about twenty-one children. For this week our teams are working with the kids by teaching sports and arts and crafts. I am teaching them Bible stories during the afternoon after everyone has had lunch. Our new home is beautiful. Really. When I get up in the morning and walk outside onto our back deck, my view is a thatch covered prayer hut that is surrounded by the mountains of South Africa. We have showers and hot water and a full kitchen with a big table that reminds me of the one that sits in North Carolina that my family gathers around every Sunday afternoon after church. My favorite time of the day is gathering around that table in the evening with the people that I live with and eating dinner together… it is loud and crazy… and it reminds me of home. We are so blessed to be here. We keep saying that we don’t feel like we are even on the race yet since we all prepared ourselves for the worst of the worst and instead here is beauty again.
The race did get a little more real today though when we became firefighters. Last night the men were asked to go put out a small fire in the woods right in front of where we live. Today we woke up and got busy with our day. I was feeding a little girl named Princess who is about a year and half and after she ate I carried her outside to the prayer hut where most of my team was. All the men were missing because the fire had started again and they went to put it out. We noticed a little while later that they were running into the house and coming back out with buckets of water. I walked up the dirt path to see what was happening and the woods were ablaze. Two of the girls stayed behind to keep the children in the prayer hut while all the other women ran to grab buckets and take them to the men who were in the woods beating out the fire. It was crazy. It took awhile, but the fire was eventually put out. Unfortunately a few hours later, it started again and so we had to go back out and restart the process. At the end of it all the guys voted this day as their favorite. And really, it was a great day! Who gets to fight fire?? We do!
I loved watching our teams work together… whether it was staying behind and watching children or packing up everyone’s stuff in case the flames made it to our house or carrying buckets or beating out the flames, everyone had a job. I’m pretty sure none of us will forget this day in South Africa!
