The Latest

Well I know I haven’t written very much since I’ve been here in Port Elizabeth, so I think I owe you all an update from the past few weeks…

   Overally our new living location is amazing! The three guys have a room to ourselves with one extra bed, for guests staying with us. Two of our leaders share one room, and another leader has a small room to herself.  And all of the nine girl students are in a big room together. But there is a also a large living room where we can see the ocean (unfortunately it’s not within walking distance like Jeffrey’s Bay). We also have a nice kitchen area, with two refrigerators (one was given to us for the duration of the trip by the church.) In fact they also donated a couple of couches and a tv as well, although we only use it on our days off (don’t worry about us wasting time in front of the tv). Our house is also in the middle of one of the nice areas of the city, so we don’t have to worry too much about safety. Our neighbors are all real friendly, and they sometimes let us go over and swim in their pools too. Speaking of which, the weather here has been hot hot hot! I don’t think we’ve had rain in several weeks, but that’s not too abnormal for South Africa. I’ll be praying for you all, I hear that this winter is quite a bear over there!

   Since we’ve finally gotten a little more “settled” in our house, we’ve been looking into the various ministries we might get involved in. Mostly they are orphanages and care-centers for the street kids, or for kids who come from at-risk homes, or if they have no one to look after them. The kids have all been brought in under the supervision of a social-worker, according to new laws, where the  kids can no longer just walk-in, they must be “checked-in.” Besides the orphanages, we’ll also be working with the Algoa Frail Center, which houses permanately disabled children, mostly for mental illnesses. We get the opportunity to really open these kids up, they might not understand very much, but they do have personality. Whenever we walk in there with our guitars they start singing “deep and wide” or “bambalela:” which is an Africa song. Some of our team will continue doing “house visits ministry,” which basically means looking for opportunities to evangelize while building relationships with families in the Walmer township. For me, I’ll be working in the Qwazikale township area with an organization called CCMP: or Combined Christian Missions to the Poor. They are kind of like an orphanage, but they run a lot of programs as well. They do Sunday Schools, soup kitchens, homework help, gardening, Bible studies, youth programs, and much more. A lot of the programs they run so that they can try to find kids that come from at-risk families, and then they follow up with a social worker to pull the kids out that house.

   Basically our schedule is mostly the same this semester, except we’re spending more time at our ministries, and we have a lot more flexibility to pursuse relationships as well. We do a small discipleship time on Monday and Wednesday mornings. Thursday mornings we do a family ministry, where we all come together to do a big project as a team. For example last week we spent a few hours cleaning up some of the stuff at this place called Maranatha, do they could get things ready for their school to start again. Officially Friday is our day off, and Saturdays we spend doing “intentional ministry,” which means we have time to go back and really get to know the people we met, or do something special during that time that you can’t do during the week. Sundays are still pretty busy too, with church twice, and youth group on Saturday. A lot of the people on our team are also involved in worship practice on Thursday night, and small groups on Wednesday nights. So things are going to start to get real busy from here on out, but I am very excited about it. I’ll be sure to tell you more about CCMP next blog, I really think they have a great mission for reaching the poor.

   Just a few prayer requests: