Adventures WorldRace SethBarnes Sponsorship Giving

| by archiveworldraceblogs

We arrived in Swaziland on November 1, 2009. And I immediately fell in love it. Seriously, immediately fell in love. As soon as we pulled up in our van from Johannesburg to our location in Nsoko, Swaziland and were greeted with excited hugs and screams from about 50 kids…..and I knew Swaziland was going to be my favorite place on the race thus far. For two weeks team S’more and Bamboo Brigade lived in Nsoko and worked with Pastor Gift, a local pastor who works closely with AIM. He has hosted at least one team from every World Race squad since the beginning! Cool, eh?!

Our main ministry with Pastor Gift involved Care Points. These are different locations set up around the Nsoko area where Gogos (Swazi Grandma’s) are given food to cook for the local children. Often this is the only decent meal the children will get each day. Between S’more and Bamboo we were spit up into 3 different care point teams, each with a different translator. Almost every day we would visit a care point in the morning and run a VBS program for the kids before lunch.
In the afternoon we had a few different ministry opportunities. Sometimes Pastor Gift arranged home visits for our care point teams. This is exactly what it sounds like- we would visit different people in the community in their homes. This ministry is really just about making good relationships, so we would share with them about ourselves, ask them questions about their stories, pray for them, sing, whatever. The women of our group were also able to help out with a couple of different Bible studies. On Tuesdays we ran a group for older women and on Friday’s we ran a group for the teenage girls in the area. While the girls ran the Bible studies our guys were helping out Pastor Gift with a soccer ministry.

Also, every night our teams cooked dinner and were responsible for feeding 5 boys from the community and 1 teenage girl: Manza, Sieboseso, and Mussa (the brothers), Clive (a 14 year old boy), Siebelo and his sister Abigail (who was 15 and pregnant). Getting to know these kids turned out to be almost everyone’s favorite ministry. I guess one reason why the brothers and the others that we fed affected me so much was that their stories are typical of Swaziland. The brothers have no parents, they are living with Siebelo and Abigail’s Gogo (grandma). Clive lives with his sister, a prostitute, and was getting kicked out of his house every night for her clients to come. You find stories like this all over Swaziland and it just breaks my heart.

More Swazi Stories to come!!!