The past month I was in Nsoko, Swaziland with my entire squad. It was ‘all squad month’ so all 56 of us racers along with our 3 squad leaders and our squad mentor stayed together. Swaziland is a beautiful place with giraffes on the side of the road and taxis that you can take for 10 Rand (less than $1) to get down the street to a safari/restaurant/gift store (where I happened to buy the Branda’s a gift :D). The ground is covered in what reminded me of red Georgia dirt. The people are so kind and welcoming. The sky looks endless and the mountains in the distance are beautiful.
It is also a broken place.
Swaziland has the highest HIV rate in the world at 26% of the population and it has the lowest life expectancy. It is very taboo to talk about HIV with people so there is a layer of shame that rests over the people living here. The majority of people in Swaziland live on less than $1 a day. There is also a major problem with fatherlessness here. Over 40% of the national population is under the age of 18. Of those under 18 years old, over 40% of them are fatherless and over 20% are orphans. Swaziland is known as the “Nation of Orphans”.
This past month was a hard one for me but a good one. I am sorry for the lack of blog posts, but internet has been very limited and I also wanted to be present with my squad while we were all together. God used my month in Swaziland to work on a lot of things in my heart. I learned, and am still learning, a lot about who God has created me to be. Living with 59 other people for an entire month is fun, but it can also be exhausting at times. There is really nowhere to go where you can just sit quietly and be alone. The only place I got any semblance of alone time was at our ministry.
All of the teams worked at different CarePoints this month. A CarePoint is a place where children can come after school to be fed and discipled. My team did something different. We worked with an organization called Swazi Vision. The couple who run it, Leo and Jill, are originally from Holland and Britain respectively, but they have been living in Africa for many years. The organization strives to teach the people of Swaziland the importance of sex in a Biblical context. They give “Choose to wait” seminars around the country in order to reach out to the young people to teach them the importance of waiting to have sex until they are married, especially with the HIV rate being so high. We mostly helped them around the office while we were there and connected with Leo and Jill and their son Ian.
God has been growing me and stretching me in many ways. I know this blog post is much too late and it isn’t profound in any way, but I wanted you all to know what we did in Swaziland. I also wanted to be real with you all. This journey is hard sometimes and sometimes it can’t be put into words. I will be trying to post a blog about my time in South Africa soon, I can’t wait to tell you all about it!
