This month my team and I are working at a Christian youth camp with an organization called UCSA in Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa. We’ve been working here for one week and it’s truly been a dream.
First, let me tell you about the ministry. UCSA is a ministry passionate about bringing young people into a meaningful relationship with Christ. The program hosts weekend camps all throughout the year during which the campers get to hear about the love of the Father and how to apply the gospel to their own lives. They also bring their passion to life through various other programs on UCSA properties and in the surrounding schools.
We have a wide variety of roles for the month, including being counselors for their youth camps, going to schools to teach a classroom for a day about what we’ve learned through our own journeys following Christ, helping set up for a 3-day outreach ministry, and more. Getting to step back into the camp atmosphere and all that it entails has been such a gift to me, as I’ve spent the last 5 summers taking high school girls to Young Life camp and have volunteered and worked at a YL camp intermittently for the last 4 years. I also have 2 other teammates with experience working on camps as either staff or as camp counselors. I honestly couldn’t imagine a better month… and then there’s our hosts.
I would be so thankful to work in this place, regardless of any of the other details, but the greatness doesn’t just stop with our ministry. I don’t even have words for how loving and hospitable our hosts are. First, we have Tarina, a playful, incredibly chill, and down-to-earth South African woman from whom we receive most of our training and instruction. Then there’s Mattys, the live-in camp director and his sassy, hilarious wife Jonete. They have gone above and beyond when it comes to hospitality. Not only does Jonete cook every meal for us (by which I mean always delicious meals that often include dessert), but the family has also invited us into their home over and over to hang out and get to know one another, invited us over for a game night, and Tarina and Jonete even laughed along as we shared all of our crazy World Race poop stories. Then, this Tuesday, they truly outdid themselves by planning for our team what they called “fun day.”
Let me tell you about fun day.
My team and I were suddenly awakened by Jonete as she came into our rooms and told us we had 10 minutes to get ready and be in the back of the truck. My first thought was that we had all slept through our alarms. Then I looked at my watch. It was 5AM. My second thought was that I was secretly glad I no longer had to run at 6:30 like I’d planned. Matthys drove us in the back of the truck to Tarina’s house where we watched the sunrise while drinking home-made condensed milk lattes and ate breakfast. Then the real fun began. Matthys called it “can shaking.” They pulled out a box of costumes, told us to dress up, then dropped us in the middle of a busy intersection with Pringles cans to shake at passing cars in order to raise money for the ministry. That was phase one. Phase two began with a list of fun activities our hosts had planned out for us around the area accompanied by a map of Jeffrey’s Bay. Those activities included eating ice cream, going to the nearby Billabong Factory store and dressing like our alter egos, worship with the owners of a nearby café, filming a “mannequin challenge” video on the beach (we had to Google the mannequin challenge.. turns out we’re kind of oblivious to a lot of things that are happening back home), playing put-put golf, and sitting in another café drinking lattes, coloring, and choosing a prophetic word for our month.
On to phase three. Our hosts encouraged a little competition as we partook in field games such as an egg toss, sack-racing, bobbing for apples, bobbing for smarties in flour, and racing to blow a bubble after eating a cracker (harder than it sounds). Then we rushed to change for what was my favorite part of the day: phase four. Once again we were driven to an unknown location with no information about where we were going. Then we went sand-boarding. My teammate, Rachel made this awesome video of our sand-boarding adventure. I’ll be sure to post it on here when I can!
The fifth and final phase was a movie night in their big hall with crepes for dinner. There wasn’t a moment of our day they didn’t fill. I’ve decided this month of ministry will be characterized by this single phrase: “Work hard, play hard.” Fun day more than exceeded all of my greatest expectations and I can already tell this month of ministry will do the same.
