Hello from the beautiful little country of Lesotho! If you’ve never heard of this place or have no idea where to find it on a map, Lesotho is actually bordered inside the country of South Africa. The simplicity of life and the vast mountain views that my team and I have found here in this country continue to capture my amazement. My team and I are staying in an area called the Malealea valley this month and we are working with a ministry called Africa4Jesus. Pieter Mierke runs this organization along with his wife Kaila and two sons, Jamie and John, ages 16 and 17. They also have the help of some great local individuals partnered with them. Africa4Jesus was originally founded in Pieters hometown of Kimberly, South Africa and purposed as a discipleship school to train young individuals for the Lord. Peiter obediently answered the Lords call on his life 9 years ago and moved with his family to the Malealea valley of Lesotho to start the 2nd location of Africa4Jesus. The original intent was to open up another discipleship school, but over the years, the main function of the organization has turned more towards community outreach. The demographics of the area don’t really allow for many students to be able to attend a training of such sort. However, Africa4Jesus has since planted a great church here, runs a preschool that’s currently on summer vacation, and continues to reach out to the small communities around them in the valley.
Mountain views and blue bird skies in the Malealea Valley
The Malealea valley provides a very much an off the grid type of living. There are 15 different villages within the valley and each village has its own chief, along with one chief that oversees the entire valley. People here mainly rely on agriculture to sustain themselves. They have small pieces of land to grow crops for themselves and shepherds tend to sheep and cattle around the area. It’s currently summer here in Southern Africa, and many crops are already up and on their way. The rains were apparently a bit delayed this spring, which has pushed back the planting for many. Some farmers are still out working up their land and getting seed in the ground. This process consists of cattle pulling a single bottom plow through the ground and one row seeders also being pulled by their livestock. Fields are half an acre in size rather than the 80 acre sections at home and the weeding is all done by hand. This place is kind of like a step back in time, but it’s so cool to be able to call it home for the month. I love the views of the fields in the valley with mountains surrounding the distance in every direction!
The Africa4Jesus base follows suit with the surrounding area. There are no power lines running to the buildings here, which means the simple idea of plugging a phone into the wall before bed doesn’t exist. Pieter has a solar system here to power all the essentials at the base. The hot and sunny days here create extra solar power to share with us for charging some of our devices, but cloudy or rainy days mean there is no such luck for any extra juice. However, between conserving battery power and no wifi, it’s amazing how much more present we are here! Along with the electricity situation, laundry is done by hand and the toilets are the long drop variety. No flushing necessary! There is one creature comfort here that is a real nice plus. Pieter has built a wood fired water heater to warm up the shower. In the evening, we’ll stoke up a fire and treat ourselves to much needed showers after our busy days of ministry. We’ve got good beds to sleep on in our rooms and the evening breezes put me right to sleep. Its so quiet at night in the valley, and on clear nights the sky is so full of stars. It’s definitely an appreciated change of pace from the city life in South America over the past three months. I’m definitely enjoying it all!
We first arrived here Thursday evening of January 2nd. We had quite a ride in and kind of a wild adventure in the passenger van we hired to bring us here! I first had to chuckle a little bit while coming across the Lesotho border. We came across during the lunch hour, and it seemed that the border agent was a bit preoccupied. The driver of our van collected all of our passports, stuck them out the window, stamp stamp stamp, and back into the window they came. Probably not the tightest of border security but a logistic coordinators dream anyhow!
We continued on and our driver followed along with the highlighted line on her gps screen. We eventually turned off onto a fairly rough gravel road, thinking we must be about there. We followed along on this path through the terrain as it continued to look less and less traveled. We came up to a pretty steep incline on the sidehill of a mountain and our driver gunned it! We made it about halfway up the incline when we came to a stop. Stuck. The van was pulling a small trailer with all of our packs in it, making it more difficult to reverse back down the narrow path. Our driver was one sweet lady, but she was no Wisconsin farmer when it came to backing up that trailer! We ended up removing our packs from the trailer, unhooking it, getting the van down the hill to a spot where it could turn around, and then slowly rolling the trailer back down to van. Welcome to Africa! Luckily nothing went wrong or rolled down the side of the mountain, but in hindsight, it was kind of a fun team problem solving situation. We got into contact with Pieter and eventually got some correct directions to get us to our destination. We arrived a little later than planned but still had plenty of time to get all settled in at Africa4Jesus, meet with Pieter and his family, and get a good nights rest after all of our long flights and travel days that came with this continent change.
We are again cooking for ourselves this month, so the following Friday morning, myself along with a couple other teammates went with Pieter to the city of Maseru to do some serious grocery shopping. My team of 6 people are here at Africa4Jesus with another team of 7 racers from our squad this month, making 13 of us total. Maseru is the nearest city with a good grocery store and its nearly a 2 hour drive to get there. With such a drive, our grocery runs are quite spaced out and the next one isn’t scheduled until the next Monday, 10 days away! That meant grocery shopping for 13 people for 10 days. Kaelyn, Kierin and myself loaded 3 shopping karts full of groceries. The lady at the deli had to double check with me that I was asking for 20 kilograms of ground hamburger! We haven’t ran out of food yet, and we’ve been eating quite alright. Thankfully, there are a few girls on the team that enjoy cooking and have been really great about teaming up to make some good meals for us all. Bless them! The drive for our shopping trip was also a great opportunity to get to know Pieter a little bit better. He really is a picture of what it looks like to rely on the Lord and trust in Him. I’m so grateful for the people I continue to meet along this journey that I’m able to learn so much from.
Grocery shop till ya drop!
With 8 hours difference in time from our last ministry location in Lima, our days and nights have been nearly flip flopped around. I managed to adjust without much trouble, but jet lag is a real thing, so Peter gave us this past Saturday off to relax and recuperate for the coming days ahead. Some of us set our hammocks out in front of the church patio. It made for the perfect place to spend some quiet time, reading and reflecting in the summer breeze. Quite a nice way to spend the day! With free time to spare, my teammate Isaac decided that shaving his head would be a good thing to occupy the day! He’s now an African man and has received some good comments from the locals on his new do! Some of the team also took a trip to a lodge located 3km up the road. There is wifi available at this lodge so we could notify and update our families on our arrival. We know our mothers want to know what we’re up to!
Sunday brought with it my first African church service experience. The service began at 11 and lasted 3.5 hours. Nearly half the service was made up of singing songs in worship. The songs are sung in the Sotho language so we weren’t able to understand the words, but it was quite evident that they were singing from their hearts! They didn’t have any instruments, music from any speakers, or a screen with any words on it, but man they sounded good together! They can harmonize and it was a lot of fun to listen to them and clap along with their beat. There was also a time for us world racers to come forward and introduce ourselves, a time for testimonies from the congregation, times of prayer, and a message given by pastor Teboho, translated to English for us by Tsepo.
Teboho and Tsepo are two young guys involved with the church and I can certainly call them friends of mine already. Teboho has been preaching in the church for 6 years now, and Tsepo has been helping out for 2. They both speak English so they are both very involved with the ministry we’re doing here and translate our English to Sotho for the people here in the valley. Peiter was initially preaching the messages in the church on Sundays, but he’s glad to have individuals raised up to carry on what he’s started. I suppose that really is the whole purpose of this discipleship idea!
The church service runs straight through the lunch hour and people from surrounding villages walk from up to two hours away to attend. Peiter doesn’t want people staying home because the journey is to much, so to refuel them for their trek back home, Africa4Jesus serves a meal to the congregation. We got to help serve the meal and fellowship with some of them afterwards as well.
Smiles with fists full of food after the Sunday service!
Our week days of ministry will look mostly the same throughout the month, but so far each day has proven to be a little bit different in it’s own way. We start every morning with a walk at 7am to wake ourselves up, pray for the day and whatever it may bring. It’s so quiet and refreshing. There are no cars about to run us over; only a few shepherds moving their livestock around and some good morning exchanges with fellow pedestrians. Between 8:30 and 9am, we head out on foot with our translators to different villages for ministry, sometimes a good hour away.
Casually sharing our hike to a village with a shepherd and his cattle. Tsepo is up front chatting with the shepherd.
We have survey questions that we ask families in the villages. Africa4Jesus wants to get a better feel for the situations of people in the valley and how the church can be of help to them. Pieter really has a grasp of what God wants His church to look like. He says it’s not enough to sit in church and simply talk about Christian love. He desires to reach out to those around them and actually make a difference in their lives! With these surveys, we get general information from them and ask things like the number of people living in the home and who is providing for them. We ask about their biggest struggles or worries and how people could help them. We ask whether or not they attend church. We get all kinds of information and Pieter posts these surveys in the church so that congregation members can see who might need help in their area and actually BE the church to their neighbors! Taking these surveys also opens doors us for us to talk about Jesus with them and encourage people with scripture. We always pray for the homes we visit and in one case, we took the time to stop and weed an elderly woman’s garden.
We came for a survey visit, but ended up sticking around for a good hour to weed this woman’s garden. Mamma Fav is pictured in the red hat in front. She is another one of our local translators and leads the singing at the church!
This is a 96 year old woman that we stopped to visit and survey. I couldn’t help but think of all the things she’s seen in her lifetime!
Some kiddos that we had some fun with at one of the homes we stopped at. It’s not so uncommon to find 10 or more people to be living in one small home.
I love getting the chance to go out into the villages and do these surveys. What a blessing to be able to experience a culture so different than mine in such a real way. It’s such a cool opportunity to be here, but how much cooler to be here for the Lord! These families that we meet are always so happy for our visits. One visit even included huge bowls of sorghum porridge that we were given and insisted to finish. I thought I might pay for that one, but it really wasn’t bad and actually quite filling for the walk home! A lot of times we will stick around for a while and have some fun if there are kids at the home. This is definitely one of my favorite ministries so far and I’m excited for another couple weeks of these village visits ahead.
We return back to the base around 1 o’clock for lunch and a little break time. It can get pretty warm in the hot afternoon sun, so the shaded church patio makes for a good spot to rest for a bit. At 2:30, we’re back at it with some projects around the base. So far, we’ve began with some leveling and preparing forms to pour some cement for a sidewalk approach to the preschool building. We’ve also started work on the foundation of a traditional style circular house built of stone, mixed cement and clay for people to stay at while visiting the church. I think this is going to be a pretty cool project to occupy our afternoons and I’m looking forward to what it will look like by the time this month is over! I’ll be sure to include some progress pictures in the next blog.
Today is Wednesday and it’s been raining all day with no sign of letting up, which is actually a pretty cool thing because we’ve been praying for rain since we’ve arrived here. The Malealea valley has received less than average rainfall the last couple of years and it has shown an effect on the agricultural community here. It’s been raining all through the night and all day today so hopefully the ground is being replenished and the crops will respond with good yields this year! With all of our scheduled work being outside activity, Pieter has given us the day to ourselves today. What a great opportunity to take advantage of the situation, get some frustratingly slow wifi at the lodge down the road and update you all with some words about what we’ve been up to in Africa so far.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the read. I’m really looking forward to the rest of this month and the things that it will bring. I’m happy to be in such a place and get to spend time with such genuine people here. Like my month in Ecuador, I can already tell this is going to be a tough place to leave!
God Bless!
