So much has happened since I have last blogged on here. I apologize; I have not had the time or the Internet to do so. I will attempt to recap the recent events:
I will begin with Walk in the Light…there are not enough words, time or space to explain the way that Walk in the Light has impacted me. It has been the single, most influential time period of my life so far. It stretched me and grew me in ways I could not have imagined. While there, we build a mud house for a man named Mandla (which means power). Mandla is paralyzed from the waist down because his daughter’s boyfriend stabbed him in the back last year. He is HIV positive and also has tuberculosis. He leaves his tiny mud house (about the size of an American bathroom) 3 times a week to go to the local clinic for treatment. Sounds like a pretty rough life, yeah? You would never guess when you talk to him. Walk in the doorway and Mandla is smiling and laughing with you, always pointing out the positives rather than the negatives in his life. His attitude is amazing! He was always willing to pray with us and talk about God too. So we built him a brand new house and he is also getting a new bed that he can sit up in. God is good.
While at Walk in the Light we visited many homes and broken families who are sick with HIV and AIDS. We prayed over them and talked to them often. The township that Walk in the Light serves has a lot of AIDS and HIV from old to young ages. Many families are broken and torn apart because of it. It is not unusual to lose a close family member. It was very emotional and hard to leave on the last day of service sites. We had grown very close to the people at Walk in the Light and particularly four boys that we spent every day with. The four boys, Snash, Tash, Sihle and Njabulo are all around age 19 or 20 and living in Haniville. They are done with high school, but don’t have the money to go on to the university and don’t have the transportation to get to a job. They have made such an impact on my life and I hope to stay friends with them forever. I would love to return to Walk in the Light every summer if I am able to.
The last week in Pietermaritzburg we went on a safari and stayed a couple of days in a primitive, rural Zulu area. While in the Zulu tribe, we went to a marriage ceremony and participated in their many traditions. Going in to it I think that we were all under the impression that this would be just another touristy thing, but it was not touristy at all. We were with a real tribe and with people who truly believed in their ancestors as all-powerful rulers over their lives. It was really creepy actually. I don’t think any of us were prepared for the spiritual warfare that we experienced there. The second night was a horrible night. I woke up in the middle of the night with really bad stomach pain so I went outside and for some reason the nurses and one of the leaders were still awake. Right away they ran up to me and asked what was wrong so I told them I wasn’t feeling well and they informed me that they had already taken 3 different people to the nearest hospital…an hour away. Within 10 minutes I was throwing up and going to the bathroom non-stop if you know what I mean. It was progressively getting worse and the 3 people that they had already taken to the hospital were so dehydrated by the time they left that they were going in and out of consciousness and couldn’t even walk to the car. It was scary though, because there was no vehicle to take me to the hospital because both cars were already at the hospital. They had to call the Zulu man to drive an hour back and get me to drive an hour again to the hospital. It had stormed that night so the dirt roads were slippery mud and the drive was pretty dangerous to say the least. I made it to the hospital with my dear friends lying in the beds across from me. The hospital was government funded so to be honest it was pretty sketchy and kind of scary. I got hooked up to an IV like the other 3 but once my first drip or bag was done, the lady didn’t close the valve so it started taking up my blood! It was gross, but she just flushed it back into me with another drip. It was really interesting at one point we were all asleep and we woke up to all of the nurses and doctors in a half circle in front of us singing Zulu worship songs. It was so beautiful and it was good to feel God’s presence in our weakest, sickest and scariest time. Things didn’t get better after our time in the hospital though, we were all still pretty sick and we learned that the rest of our group was getting sick as well. Not as severe as we were, but the group was dropping like flies. Let’s just say the safari after that was not at all the joyous time we were expecting it to be. We were sick and weak the entire time. The only positive thing I can think of that came from that week was the unity that arose in our group and the close family that we became. If you were feeling well one hour you were taking care of someone else while they threw up had a fever. It was really touching to see the way that the group came together to care for one another.
After service sites and the Zulu/safari/hell week, we left African Enterprise for our trek down the East coast of South Africa towards Cape Town. On the trip we had many stops at interesting tourist places such as the Cango Caves, an ostrich farm, and the most fun…bungy jumping from the highest bridge in the world!
It was amazing and so much fun! I am so glad that I did it. We stayed almost every night along the water which was so nice especially after being so sick it was nice and relaxing to walk along the beach and smell the fresh, salty air. It was a nice week of travel and arriving in Cape Town we spent two days in the downtown area before splitting up into two groups, one group staying at a university called Bible Institute and the other group staying with families in a township called Oceanview. Oceanview is a community of coloured people (half black half white) who were displaced during Apartheid from their neighborhoods and forced to move to this region that was not developed at all, with no electricity or running water. They were forced to completely build a community from nothing. By the way, in South Africa the term coloured is not a bad term, it is an official class of people and they are proud to be coloured.
I am at home stays this week and am staying with a family of four in a two-bedroom house that is about the size of my living room at home. There is a bathtub only and no sink, a very tiny kitchen with a mini-fridge and no table to eat at. The family doesn’t have enough silverware for us to all eat a meal at the same time and only the “master” bedroom has a door. The family consists of Naomi and Reagan with their kids Uriel and Tiffany. They have so graciously given up their bedroom to us and they are now sleeping all four of them on two twin beds. They are a strong Christian family, just trying to get by. They have a small building behind their house that they let a Rastafarian man live in. One day Naomi told me that she is working at a ministry in the neighborhood where she doesn’t usually get paid, but she doesn’t care about the money she does it purely to serve God and to serve people.
It has been a very interesting week so far and I am getting ready to go home in only two weeks! It is going to be a very hard adjustment going back to the USA, but I am really starting to get excited to go home. I miss my family, friends and healthy food! I really miss Tara and can’t wait to see her and celebrate she and Luke’s recent engagement!:) Thank you all for your prayers and support. This semester has surely been life changing and has been the best time of my life so far. There is no doubt in my mind that this is where God wanted me to be and I am so thankful to have had this opportunity. Two weeks and I am homeward bound! :)
