Plan:
I’ve been in Swaziland since December 3rd and we have been staying at a ministry site called El Shaddai. It’s an orphanage on top of a mountain if you haven’t already seen pictures from Facebook! It’s absolutely beautiful here. It’s the rainy season so everything is lush and green! The kids here are so stinking wonderful and I am so blessed to be able to spend my month here! Next month on January 2nd or 3rd(they don’t tell us much) we leave the country to go to South Africa and then come back into Swaziland… To go to our next ministry site which is only a half hour from town! Not a hour and a half which we currently have and half of it is down the mountain! You might think that living in isolation is nice and sounds peaceful but for someone like myself I’m going crazy up here. Oh well it’s a part of growing!
Struggles:
We currently just got our power back after 3 days of no power! It was lovely truly. We don’t have wifi or electric ovens anyways. It wasn’t too bad. We almost ran out of water too!! It’s Christmas time and 4 months in plus there’s no snow here on the mountain. It makes things a little difficult to stay away from being homesick. Enjoy the snow and the cold weather. ??
Living style:
I also have a new team of all girls. We live in a small small cabin next to the dining area. We have found 3 scorpions (poisonous), several LARGE spiders, centipedes, beetles, moths, and many other types of bugs. Crawling/flying either on us, in our beds, or running across the floor. It’s lovely. Learning how to keep your small amount of stuff put together is a definite learning situation here.
Ministry:
Every week day we wake up to eat breakfast at 7:30. We do prayers and devotions at 8:30 and start our work at 9. For the past two weeks my team has been gardening…aka plucking weeds. We do our work projects until 12pm. We eat lunch, hangout, take a nap, maybe read, chat, and go back to ministry at 3pm to 5pm to hangout with our buddies. My buddies names are Nicholas and Jaden. They are 8 & 9 years old and are the cutest things EVER. They love to hammock, play soccer, and hangout by the monkey bars. Oh and they love cars! They are so precious and I seriously enjoy spending time with them when they aren’t “to busy” to hangout with me.
Cooking:
Once a week each team cleans and cooks for the squad. Let me say cooking for 38 people can be pretty fun sometimes. A lot of soup and sandwiches.
Weekend:
Every Saturday we are able to go into town and get wifi. Let me just say wifi in 3rd world countries even at a town center is super frustrating. It hardly works. But it’s apart of life and learning to appreciate when it does. On Sundays we have church at 11! Talk about sleeping in…. Just kidding that doesn’t happen.
Fun Stuff:
A couple Saturdays ago we got to go on a Safari in South Africa. How freakin cool is that! Cross that one off my bucket list! It was absolutely nothing of what I was expecting but still totally worth it. Think of the Lion King if you can’t remember go watch it. We saw all those animals except…. Lions. No freaking lions. We got to see cheetahs though that was cool. They just hangout. Super casual. It wasn’t as dry as I thought it would be but we aren’t in the desert so it makes sense.
Community:
This past week we went on our first house visit. It was so hard to see what little these people had and how they still seemed to be quite happy. This mother named Fuhti God bless her. All of her kids looked exactly like her. She has a small garden where she makes her living for her family. The husband I don’t know if he is even around or maybe he was at work. The language barrier is so real. She doesn’t understand any English but we had a translator. One of her youngest kids and the only boy of the family had this precious little smile that didn’t stop the whole time we were there. His name is way to hard to spell or even pronounce so we will go with Goso. I got him to smile a couple times with his teeth as I tried to teach him how to dance, make silly faces, and move him in different directions. He was smiling the whole time but just the little smirk ??. I fell in love with Goso so quickly. We had a church service and a community lunch hosted by El Shaddai this Sunday and I got to see Goso again. I wasn’t wearing my glasses anymore so he seemed even shyer at first but it seemed as though he eventually remembered.
Learning:
I am still continuing to learn how much The Lord truly loves me and accepts me. I am relearning my worth and value and learning how to love better.
Health:
I’ve been sick 3 times since being on this stinkin mountain.
Overall:
I am super blessed to be here at El Shaddai as all squad month. I can’t wait to see what God has for me and can’t wait to keep growing and maturing in his love for me and how to love people better. It’s a process I will walk through for the rest of my life.
I want to encourage you as the reader of this long boring blog if you got to the end think of how you can love yourself better and love others better.
