First of all I would like to just say I’m sorry I haven’t blogged in about 2 months, but this time my reason for blogging is actually a pretty good one. For the past 3 months I’ve been living in Bokspits, Botswana for the final leg of my race.
Bokspits is a small village of about 500 people that has two small shops, a clinic, a police station, a playgroup and a primary school and that’s about it. To all of you at home that may seem insanely scarce and in the middle of nowhere, but of all the teams south of Tsabong, the largest (yet still fairly small for us) town in the southern part of Botswana) we actually have the biggest village. Bokspits is in the middle of the Kgalagadi Desert, so it’s sandy, sunny and hot (well, hot during the day- pretty cold at night though). For those of you who know me, you know I don’t really love sand, or even the heat that much…so you can imagine that living in the desert is a piece of cake for me (JK.).
Physically, Bokspits was definitely the hardest place to live. My team (which is the same as it was in Malaysia), all is living in a church (The Dutch Reform Church) that took us about 5 hours by bus to get to from Tsabong. The church has just one room, where we all have our tents set up in. On the stage we have a table that holds our food and a gas powered stove. To get to our bathroom you walk across a sandy field (about 50 feet), which is also where we have our shower that works half the time. The biggest blessing about our church I think is definitely the electricity. Some days it doesn’t work, but whenever it does we have a lightbulb…something most of the other teams don’t have.
It honestly is difficult living here, not being clean all the time, cooking for ourselves (my first time in 7 months), washing all our laundry by hand, living with sand EVERYWHERE, but I still wouldn’t trade it. The other part that was somewhat difficult was our ministry. Not that ministry itself was hard, but we had to make our own ministry. We had to just go out in the community and see what we thought needed to be done and then try to do it. Not that easy. As of right now, we’re working in the playgroup, we have worked with the police station giving town meetings about drug and alcohol abuse, having prayer after church, hosting youth group, and doing a lot of ATL’s (where we pray and see where God leads us). Our main goal here in Bokspits is to be Jesus for someone, and just love unconditionally.
We’re going to be in Bokspits for another 2 weeks before going to Durban for our final debrief, and then I’ll be heading back to America, so you won’t get another blog until around that time (if you can guess, there’s no wifi in Bokspits), but for our final two weeks you can be praying for my team for a few things:
1) We all would stay present and excited doing ministry until when we are physically leaving
2) That we would be able to make lasting impacts on the people around us
3) For water/rain. Honestly…our water runs out about once a week and stays gone for 4-5 days so life gets pretty tough. It’s a serious problem.
4) That I’ll see a rhino tomorrow on our safari- there’s no elephants so they’re the next best thing.
4) Safe travels leaving Bokspits and eventually Africa!
