Day in the life of Soweto Patrick Jabulani Kuhlwayo Conti

In italics are thoughts throughout the day

7:00 – woke up around 6:30, prayed for 30 or 45 mins

8:00 – Ate breakfast

- Lifted weights à thinking bout Dave Crowder song, “Revolutionary Love” hmm… Christ’s love is so radical, so big, so revolutionary…how can I better receive & reflect such a love
- Showered

9:00 – Drove to Office at Cooper Center in Mbabane…bout 7 minute drive

-In Office:
- Prepped for staff meeting
- Talked with Roger & Nathi about upcoming camp
- Their upcoming schedules
- ministering in schools around Mbabane

10:00 – Staff Meeting

- Worship
- Prayer
- Talked about what it means to truly seek God with all your heart
o Takes humility, dependence on God, listening to God’s voice, it takes honesty, centrality of Jesus, surrendering all, a journey of radical love, trust and faith…God wants our heart
- We then talked about what’s going on with all the different Carepoints & programs
11:00 – Staff Meeting

- We are rolling out a new strategic plan in order to make the Carepoints run with excellence. It involves having an ex-pat missionary, Nathi or Roger over 1 or 2 Carepoints as a site liaison or coordinator. This is to ensure accountability and to build depth into the relationships instead of trying to have true relationship with 10 different Carepoints. It will help us to go deeper, build into the teachers, cooks & children’s lives more effectively and help the Carepoint to truly be what we want it to be. Its exciting but it’ll take a lot of work and prayers to make the change
12:00 – Kids Club Meeting

- Gugu, Charles & I met to talk about the direction and goals for our kids clubs.
- We talked about performance indicators for evaluation, monitoring & improvement
- We also talked about reconciling Mbabane to what is happening in Manzini

1:00 – Organized my desk, checked email, wrote something up for Roger, went to Lunch
With Van Rensburgs

2:00 – Lunch with Dave (Beano) & Sharon Van Rensburg

- Conversation Topics
o My parents
o My camping trip over the past weekend
o Tyrone
o Rwanda
o My Future
o Restaurants & food
o Mozambique
o Hiking

3:00 – Finished up Lunch

- went to Standard Bank (saw Wayne Wilson, another missionary from NYC)
- Returned to office

4:00 – Office

- Print Preliminery schedule for camp
- Think about camp budget
- Make a list of questions we need to ask ourselves as we are preparing for camp
- Drive home: the Rodgers house ( I live in a granny flat)

5:00 – Siswati Lesson

- “Sawubona” (Hi, or literally I saw you)
- “Yebo” (Yes)
- “Unjani” (How are you)
- Ngiyaphila (I’m good or literally I am having life)

6:00 – Siswati Lesson

- Usebentaphi? (where do you work?)
- Ngisebenta Ka Children’s Cup (I work at Children’s Cup)

7:00 – Dinner with Ben, Susan, Charles & Kristen

- Jambalaya, green beans, butternut, salad & rolls
- Coversation topics
o Siswati lesson
o Young’s car purchase
o Todd n Jen
o How Susan chose Levi’s name

8:00 - Finishing up dinner

- went to my room to write some thoughts on theme à “God’s plan for your life”

9:00 – Writing more & playing guitar

10:00 – still playing guitar, Read, “Jesus Style”

11:00 – Thinking about tomorrow

- What is revolutionary love, how can I personally show that, do I understand it?
- Tired, thinking about taking a trip, and about the upcoming World Cup
- Sleep

1:30 – I know, I know my day is up but got to put this in there

- I wake up hearing water flowing…is someone in my shower, did I leave the water on, is Miss Joyce taking a shower??? …I walk into my bathroom from my room only to step into about 2 inches of water … not good, this is a bad sign…so I continue on through the bathroom to the lounge area of my granny flat. I am greeted by smoke (note* I don’t have my contacts in)…oh great, I have a flood & fire going on at 1:30 in the morning, is that my ceiling on the floor, what is going on here…So a pipe burst and there was hot, hot water coming down through the ceiling which eventually brought down the ceiling itself, the smoke I thought I had seen was in fact steam, I then busied myself scurrying around the house to turn off the water…Miss Joyce woke up and helped me to clean up. I went to bed again around 3:00 in the morning, not that everything was cleaned up but I had defeated the floodwaters and taken everything outside to dry…I woke up to a lil personal African Katrina…not to say I went through anything like those people in NOLA but my much disoriented mind made that connection…

Check out Charles Blog for tomorrow’s “A Day in the Life Of”…he’s the most crazy, cool cat in Swaziland with a big heart for Jesus…he’s bound to have stories and crazy thoughts to share

http://charlesandkristen.blogspot.com/

Here are pics of the girl

She already looks better than she did when we first saw here. Teresa Rehmeyer gave her some medicines and there is a little more weight in her face than before. I need to show a picture of someone standing next to her for y'all to really understand how small she is...pray for her. Hopefully we can help her have a fighting chance

 
  

A 9 year old...actually she's 16

The other day we had a little medical clinic at one of our new sites in the Madonsa area of Manzini. It is a more rural than most of our other sites as it is outside the city limits and thus is under the control of traditional leadership…the chief, indvuna & bacupho. It is situated in a beautiful area and there are a bunch of children there. Daran & Teresa Rehmeyer as well as Kristen Young were treating the children medically. Charles Young and I were busy outside playing with the children & trying our best to build relationships with the people. There was one girl that I saw that just looked frail, looked sick…she didn’t look like a Swazi with their round beautiful faces but rather she looked like she was from Kenya except she looked like those faces you see in Niger that are starving…so frail, so not right…hard to explain but I guess to sum it up she looked like a skeleton. I find out later that she told Teresa that she was 16 years old…I can’t say I’m surprised because her eyes told the story of a hard 16 years even though her physical characteristics looked more like a 8 or 9 year old. She hadn’t really developed, she was tiny, it was hard to look at her in such a state. She’s had diarrhea for as long as she can remember which usually a sign of full blown AIDS is. Can we help this girl; will she live for another year, another month?? If I go with percentages, its most likely she won’t make it another year…I can’t go with percentages, I can’t go with what logic tells me, we Children’s Cup can’t turn a blind eye, we can’t turn from her because we want to protect our hearts from pain…from what seems like a certainty for her, death…we can’t turn and do nothing. I don’t know how this story plays out, but I know we will pray for this girl, love this girl, and help this girl as much as we can. I also know that when Charles & I were playing with the children she was in there with the rest of them. God allowed us to see her smile, to see her laugh and play without the weight of life on her shoulders. What a privilege it was to give this girl a day of good memories, of joy, of hope. Please pray that we can get the assistance this girl needs and that if we can get her started on ARVs that she’ll be able to handle the shock they are to one’s system at first. HIV is horrible, I hate it…but I gotta stay in this fight, I got to keep on loving, I got to show people hope & love…I got to help train a new generation how to live the right way, a way that leads to abundant life, a way that avoids HIV/AIDS. I’ll try to get a picture of this girl to show y’all.

Parent's Rocking out @ the Carepoints

 

Parents trip...continued...sorry took so long

Long time gone…it is getting harder and harder to blog these days because I have my hand in so many different baskets as opportunities have really opened up and exploded for me to get involved in different projects, initiatives and the like. Like right now I am involved in setting up a Candlelight memorial, a children’s prayer day for the city of Manzini & a 7 aside soccer tournament for the youth of Mbabane. This is in addition to all of the other stuff going on with Children’s Cup. It is quite crazy and thus I don’t have much time to sit down & write. This is not for lack of topics or stories but truly a time crunch.

So to finish up on my parent’s story that I started awhile ago. They came and we had a good time going around Swaziland and Mozambique. They got to see where our new church/Carepoint project is going on in Mozambique. It was a great time for them to see the beginnings of a project and hopefully I can keep them and y’all the huge audience that reads my blogs (not really) updated on it. When they saw it consisted of just a piece of land (mostly sand) with a container and two trees on it. I’ll update next week at what is there now. We then were able to visit some of the Carepoints in Swaziland where my mom did some arts & crafts with the children at two of our pre-schools. Those children will remember that day very fondly and it has encouraged our teachers to really explore the use of art in their classrooms. It is cool to see the creativity my mom initiated in the teachers.

Another morning my parents and I went up to one of the government hospitals in Manzini. We had a small ceremony where my mom donated the curtains she has been working on to the hospital administrator, head matron and the head nurse of the children’s ward. It was cool to see…in a couple of weeks I’ll show you more of a before and after of the children’s ward…still working on getting all those curtains up. My parents got to see my life over here which was important to me. I don’t know but somehow I was struggling a bit or in a funk before they came but now I’m on fire again for what God has me doing over here. I think it involves getting back to that place where I’m at Jesus’ feet.

My parents are cool, they are what I consider home, they have blessed me immensely in my 22 years. Shout out to Dad & Mom for raising me right and loving me lots. Love you guys!