Adventures WorldRace SethBarnes Sponsorship Giving

| by archiveworldraceblogs

I’m sitting in a slow internet place in the beautiful Kingdom of Swaziland. Today all the World Racers are having a day of silence. So I thought I would try to finally catch up on journaling and at least one blog and try to get some photos uploaded with this slow connection, which so far has proven to be slightly frustrating today. I let my friend Stacey use some of my photos, so if you want to see her blog on our time in Mozambique too, Here is her link…..http://stacyutecht.theworldrace.org/index.asp?filename=photos-from-mozambique


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Mozambique started off rough but was redeemed through God putting an amazing man and his family into our lives. I cant begin to say how big of a blessing it was that Jaco & Maria and their two awesome kids welcomed us into their lives and home. Our team and Team 61 spent the last 10 days or so camping out on Jacos property in front of a lake that every night had amazing sunsets. We helped build showers and bathrooms so that Jaco could better support big groups coming in and doing ministry and volunteer work. Some of the girls spent an incredible amount of time helping sort through receipts helping organize there past finances and building a database of contacts. We spend time serving them and helping them with ordinary life, things that if were not done by others, would have taken Maria much longer and would have taken her away from their ministry.

The last few days most of the girls and I went and lived with about 23 orphans in a place called Temane. Following the cyclone these group of kids showed up looking for help like countless other people in the area. I think they were on their own before the cyclone, but after the storm, the government gave some land for a temporary orphanage and then Unicef came in and set-up the structure and tent. The week we arrived at Jaco’s house it began to get really cold at night and so we helped Jaco gather blankets and he bought some thatch mats for them to sleep on because until then they had just been sleeping on the cold dirt ground under the tent.

The first night I slept in the tent with them, I had my sleeping bag plus a liner and l was absolutely freezing all night. I could not imagine how these kids slept before they were given the mats and thick blankets. All throughout the night one of the girls would run outside and make this horrible sound as she threw-up. A few other children were heard coughing throughout the night too. But all things considered these kids were being taken care of by a handful of people in the community that acted as parents, helped cook for them, made sure they went to school and slept in the tent with them at night.

Along with Jaco who checked in on them regularly and is trying to work with the government to set-up an orphanage closer to Vilanculos, as Temane is about an hour from the city. God also has given Jaco and Maria the vision for building a large orphanage near there home, which will eventually become a place for volunteers and missionaries to stay and work with the orphanage and in the surrounding community.