This month my entire squad has been together at El Shaddai Children’s Home in Swaziland. It is an orphanage located at the top of a mountain near the town of Pigg’s Peak. Swaziland is a really interesting place, and theres a very prominent spiritual heaviness about this place. Swaziland is a monarchy ruled by a guy called King Swati. Not a dictatorship, but a monarchy. Old school, back in the day buffet, your highness, monarchy. From what I’ve seen things are pretty delayed around here. All of the area we’re staying at and have driven through is very rural and poor. Lots of little clay shacks, goats, and cows. Swazi is also a very male dominated society. Women have pretty much no rights or respect around here. There are even laws that say if if a girl is raped while wearing a mini skirt or short shorts, her rapist is not held responsible, because she was asking for it. On top of that there is a lot of witchcraft that goes on around here. Theres a witchdoctor that lives a few minutes down the road. With all these things going on and other stuff that happens, the atmosphere in this country is really spiritually tense, and there’s a lot of spiritual warfare going on. But despite the darkness here, i just can’t get over how awesome it feels to be here and how beautiful this country is.
This is the view from right outside our huts at El Shaddai. We wake up to this every morning
Here at El Shaddai they have around 70 orphans here ranging from babies to high schoolers. A lot of them are here because their parents sexually abused them (in some cases very violently) or because their parents died of HIV and AIDS. There are about 40 kids which have been paired up with one racer on our squad. So I got paired up with an awesome kid named Nick.
Nick is 7 years old, he’s in the first grade, and he’s really smart. I met him on the first day we were here when the other racers told me there was a kid doing flips. DUDE I DO FLIPS. so as soon as i did a flip like him, we were friends. We had to choose one of the kids, and i ended up not being able to choose nick as my kid which really sucked. But the kid I had chosen ended up leaving El Shaddai, and i now get to share Nick with my squadmate Jenna Ehde! So I get to hang out with Nick every day, help him with his homework, play with him, and just love on him, which is something these kids don’t get too much of. It’s been awesome hanging out with this little guy!
Also we went on some homestead visits to pray for, encourage, and bring food to the people who live around the mountain El Shaddai is located on. We went to two housed and brought them each a big bag of rice, a big bag of maize, a big bag of flour, cooking oil, soap, and a nice plastic bucket. We visited this man called Themba and he told us about his life and how he struggles to take care of his 9 children. He had been praying for someone to come bless him and give him something to eat, since he hasn’t been able to work for a long time. It was awesome being a blessing to him. He had holes in his ear like me, and when i asked why he had those, he said a guru cut his ears so that he could hear better. Crazy.
This is Themba’s house. A proper, straight up, mud hut.
Internet is scarce and so i’m running out of time to write this blog. I will be posting more about my adventures in Swaziland soon, including my trek through the african jungle with some of the guys on my squad. It’s been an awesome month so far and i can’t wait to tell you all about what happens for the rest of this month! LATER!
