After surviving 5 long days of traveling, I arrived at my new home!
Once my team landed at the airport in Johannesburg, South Africa we still had quite the trek ahead of us. We had an 18 hour bus ride through the night to a town called Port Elizabeth, then from there another 2 hour bus ride to the town we will call home for the next three months, Jeffery’s Bay.
Though I was full of excitement and eagerness to see South Africa and what the new town I live in looks like, exhaustion got the best of me and I slept majority of the bus rides all the way until we pulled in the drive way of our new house.
I was pleasantly surprised when I awoke to our new house and got to explore.
My team has our very own luxurious house with four bedrooms and a bunk bed in each! We have two showers, two bathrooms, and a kitchen!
We were even joined by two other teams from our squad as our neighbors!
These wonderful houses are right on our ministry site!
Our ministry is working with an organization called Global Leadership Academy (“Global” for short). The organization has a gorgeous high school and the starting of a primary school. Both schools are private schools that anyone can pay to attend, but the organization hosts more than half of the students on scholarship. This provides children with education from one of South Africa’s top three schools, when they would otherwise not have access to any education.
Here is a picture of the outside of the high school.
In South Africa, December is their Christmas break, so the kids actually are not in school right now. Therefore, my team and the two others that joined us will be doing manual labor for Global until the first day of school in January when we will be able to help in the schools!
Right now, our manual labor looks like building more houses to host other volunteers, such as World Race Teams. These houses (including ours) also double as the primary school with the first floor of each house being a classroom.
Or helping build more classrooms in the high school! Here, we are pictured varnishing the wood planks that will soon become the flooring of a dance class room!
I’ve only been here for a little over a week, and already, this feels like home. I have truly fallen in love with South Africa, this ministry, and all the things both have to offer. I cannot wait to see what God has in store for me here!
