Alive in SA

Hello, hello, hello.

I am in South Africa with some friends from Adventures in Missions. Its been fun to get away and hang out with some guys that are my age. We've been exploring with no real agenda and its been great.

The week before I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off at our Christmas Parties. We had over 4,000 children total come out for Christmas parties in Swaziland and Mozambique. I want to say thank you to the team from Celebration Church in Georgetown, TX for coming and being the hands and feet of Jesus.


-Texas Team
- Kids at the Manzini Party

Hope everyone is having a great Christmas season!

IT'S ABOUT WORSHIP

Sorry to all you blog readers, I’ve been running around like crazy the past two months. I apologize for the lack of blogs…hopefully I’ll be able to update y’all more the next few weeks.

Children’s Cup had a time of prayer and worship the other day. A big thank you to my boy Caleb Lange for leading worship for us. Check out his blog as he travels the world for the cause of Christ.

God’s really been speaking to me lately about re-focusing my life on him. It is so easy to get busy and leave God behind. Christ needs to be the center of our lives and our ministry.

It was an awesome time of prayer and God has been able to speak a couple things into my life that I really hadn’t slowed down enough to hear. Check out some pics of the night:

Responsible to Tell 2

2nd story...

...I am 15, my mom died last year, my dad died two years ago. Both of them had HIV even though they announced that it was TB at their funerals. I have 2 younger sisters and 3 younger brothers to look after. We get some food from the World Food Program but we usually do not have enough to eat. My uncle is using our land to grow his own crops. He only gives us a little of that food. I had to drop out of school because we had no money and no food. Only one of my younger sisters is going to school and it is a free school put on by the local church. I feel like I should be doing something, but I don’t know what to do. We look for food, we ask people to help us but we still are hungry. I used to want to become a police man, now I just want to feed my brothers and sisters. It is such a responsibility; I don’t know how we will survive the upcoming dry season.

Inner thoughts

A lot of times people ask what my heart is...to rephrase better in essence they ask, "What is the passionate desire of your heart of hearts to do in this life?"

You see I sometimes struggle with this question. Most of the time it all seems fuzzy and I don't really know. Africa is in my heart but it doesn't at least feel the same as the way it bleeds out of other people.

I know God called me back here for two years. I know that it is for his purpose and glory. My heart is to serve God where he's called me...that's it.

Maybe I'm wired differently, but I talk to so many people and they say God broke my heart for this or that (orphans, africa, mozambique, China, Somalia, prostitutes, etc.) and then decided to do something. Instead I went because God asked me to and am relying on him to bring me around, truly, I mean truly embrace this call and deeply love the people of Southern Africa.

I'm following God and am continually needing him to break my heart so I'm truly broken for the people I'm serving, for Southern Africa's orphans. Maybe its just I'm a bit thick skinned or maybe its because I've been in Africa for awhile...but often I ask God for just one thing...the ability to love.

Comments, other's experience??? Does this make sense?

Responsible to Tell

I’ve realized I have a tendency to downplay the situation in Africa and the children we work with. When I talk to people about what I’m doing it is very matter of factly. We tell people that come to Africa, “now that you’ve seen, you are responsible”. Seeing the children, the poverty, the death and the hopelessness in Africa demands a response. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to be posting short blogs that tell the real story, explain my passion and challenge you.

Here is the first, Imagine with me this often faced reality.

I am a little 12 year old girl, I am sick, I have HIV. The other children at school see that I am sick all of the time. All of the children begin to talk about me, they talk behind my back and say that I have HIV. The children say that I must be having sex with older boys. They accuse me of being stupid for doing such a foolish thing. Little do they know that when I was 6 years old, my uncle raped me. My own mother won’t believe me, how will a whole group of classmates. My mother, that’s another thing. She doesn’t know what to think. She sees that I go to church every week and knows I am a good girl. Yet, I have HIV, she won’t believe that her brother (my uncle) would rape me. I feel dirty, I feel unloved, I feel like I am a burden, I feel misunderstood. I have no friends, the other children have been told to stay away from me. I feel like I have no future, like I have no hope. My life is horrible.

Chicken Story...

I had one of those only in Africa days. I didn’t have too much to do so I went with Gugu ‘Dynamite’ Dlamini to visit a family that had helped her in a tough situation in 1993. It had been 14 years since she saw this family but God put it in her heart to visit them and thank them.

In 1993 Gugu crossed the country of Swaziland to give her uncle some paperwork and pass a message for her parents. In those days different parts of Swaziland had different holidays and it just so happened that she arrived in Siteki only to find her uncle was not home. Gugu returned to town from her uncle’s empty house only to find that the last bus had already left. She was stuck in Siteki and didn’t know anyone. This young mother and her three children invited her to stay the night at their homestead. Gugu accepted and was blown away by their hospitality. This family that didn’t have clean water or clothes for the children were so warm and so welcoming…the children walked her to the bus station the next day and stayed out in the cold with her until the bus came. Gugu told me she was truly touched by this family and always had it in her heart to go back and find them.

Fast forward to 2007…Gugu, two of the Dynamic children and myself head out to Siteki to try to find this family. We have some general directions from Gugu’s uncle who stays in Siteki. The family had moved to a small town Sitsasweni. There are few places in Swaziland were there are no people…we were on the road past Siteki and finally saw the turn off to Sitsasweni. We must have been on that road for 10 minutes without seeing a single house, homestead or person. Gugu and I were just shaking our heads thinking we were lost or had no hope of finding the family. Then we’re almost hit by a huge almost falling apart bus which comes barreling at us down the small dirt road. Having luckly swerved out of the way we go on encouraged by the bus sighting. One minute later we literally drive through a cattle fence and enter the surprisingly spread out town of Sitsasweni. We ask some local farmers where the family’s homestead is. They tell us to check with the boys at the 2^nd shop in town. Apparently missing the first store we drive right past the 2^nd shop in oblivion. A kilometer down the road we pull up next to two old men (Mukhulus/Madalas) We ask the men where the family lives and they tell us to take the 2^nd left. They are laughing and ask Gugu if she’s trying to help me find the white volunteer. They don’t believe that we want to see the family but it must be me chasing after the white girl...we find out later that there is a peace corps volunteer who lives on the homestead.

Anyways, we arrive at the homestead and find out that the children live with their father. We do find the mother though, and she is amazed to see Gugu after all this time. We pray for her and the rest of the family on the homestead. We sat and enjoyed the African hospitality. We sang songs and traded stories. We gave them some gifts of clothing and food before heading out. In response they handed Gugu a chicken…yes a live chicken. So this is my story about how I ended up driving with a chicken flying around in the back of my car. Africa…gotta love it!!

-I realize there are probably a lot of grammmmmatical errors in this, don’t streessss….