Liefie ek is by die huis! Honey, I’m home!!!!! I’m living in Jeffery’s Bay, South Africa for the next two months in a real life log cabin. I’m not kidding, it looks like a literal Lincoln log house and it’s a real treat. The house in built on on school campus. The school is a private Christian school called Global Leadership Academy. It provides education and some hostel-like housing for both a primary and high school. It really seeks out kids in the community who would otherwise not go to school and allows them to get a solid education. Everything at GLA is from the Father, and I’m being serious here because all of it has been donated. It’s a beautiful well-kept campus with a large high school and multiple separate classroom cabins for the primary school, and a big field for rugby. Our hosts work for GLA and are good people that speak kindly and do all things with love and obedience to the Father. GLA is about two miles outside of downtown Jeffery’s Bay which is a surf town on the beach. We can actually see the ocean from our cabin because we sit up on a bit of a hill and to the other side of GLA there are mountains and a wind farm in the distance. The sun sets that way every night and thus far has not disappointed. Like I said before, beautiful.
Ministry has been centered around doing work at the school and on campus mostly. Each team within my squad has their own ministry, like laying the foundation for another primary school cabin classroom or planting a vegetable garden or painting bathrooms, you get the point. But my team’s ministry is miscellaneous. It looks different every day. Our job is just to fill a need whenever our hosts see that there is one. One day, I was able to help our host mom Wendy cook and prepare meals for that day for our squad. Another day I was nannying our host’s kids and some of their friends. Caroline and I walked with the seven kids to McDonald’s to get ice cream and then came back to get a fair rotation of pushes going in my hammock. Another day I’d be cleaning out a storage closet and reorganizing it or doing a deep clean of a very unestablished storage or work shed. My teammates and I moved rusty equipment, dirty tools, supplies, random pieces of furniture starting to mold, buckets that were stuck in poop, etc. all out of the shed, threw away half of it and then carried it all back in. Other days I’ve helped sand desks or peel potatoes or fetch water for my squadmates doing manual labor. I was also a primary school camp counselor for five days at an overnight camp. I had seven fourth, fifth, and sixth graders who I got to hang out with and love on so that was sweet, also.
Sounds very mundane and tedious and it is. But I am super duper okay with doing it all! I love ministering to our hosts and to my squad in random ways and being able to participate in camp was a trip in and of itself. I’ve prayed for joy everyday and have found joy everyday in my ministry days and off days. This isn’t how I pictured Africa in my head, but I’m content with it.
I apologize for being MIA online, I just can’t afford to miss a moment here in JBay…and the wifi is *spotty*.
Thank you to all my prayer warriors, I love you guys a ton!
Julia
