Hey everyone! I hope that you have managed to survive the past couple of days since the last update :) Well I must start off by sharing my excitement over my newly purchased tickets to the World Cup! We will be sitting in row 18 by the 60ish yard line, only a couple yards from the field! Get excited. Moving on, I guess I’ll just tell you all a little bit about my first day of work here. This blog post is going to be relatively short but I have much to say about the past week so I will quickly update this blog with more stories and reflections!
I’ll try my best to be brief with all it, but you’ve got to understand that there is a ridiculous amount of stuff to talk with you about and as a religion major (who writes papers for a living) I just can’t leave stuff out! These are going to be a long series of posts I believe (because I have tons of energy and material to discuss) so just bare with me please! Ok so now that I used an paragraph to explain to you why there will be so many paragraphs, lets get this thing started...
My first day, I did very little in the morning. Just worked on a few miscilaneous things around the Living Hope office. In the afternoon, I met up with a college team, who will be here for about a week, to eat lunch with and discuss our mission objectives with local Living Hope staff. We will be working with kids ages 4-13 in a town called Ocean View. All of these staff were an absolute joy to meet and I look forward to getting to know them. The staff (Miegan, Alister, Nathan, and Julie) are all Cape Town natives and have been working with the kids for several years. Yesterday Julie handed me a picture of a girl who had apparently gone missing very recently. I asked her if she knew her personally. Her response was that she didn’t but that it happens all the time and it was certainly no surprise to my friend Julie. How sad. Later on in the afternoon, I went to Holiday Club (VBS) that we were hosting inside a day care building. For about 15 minutes before we start we just play around with the kids. I got my first opportunity of the summer to play a little soccer with some of the kids there. There were about 10 of us running around on a dirt and dusty path trying to kick the ball through each goal, which were just two rocks next to each other. I may not be the best soccer player in the world but some of these kids are beasts. Seriously impressive for the age of 6 or 7! A few of the kids were playing in shoes but I’d say about half of the boys were playing in the rocky and trash filled streets in bare feet. Almost all of the kids have consist running noses since tissues or paper towels are too expensive for use. When we have holiday club we have several activities we do with the children. We start off by singing a few songs in English (and a couple in Africkaans) then we share Bible stories with the kids. Sometimes asking them to act out the story as we tell it. We then do some other activity like drawing and then give them their food as they leave club.
To be completely honest, most kids do not come for the Bible stories or songs, but rather, for the food we give them on the way out. If there were no food at the end of holiday club, I’m guessing 25% of the kids would come, if that. These kids are seriously deprived of almost everything. They were fighting over the amount of food provided, fighting over the paper to draw on, and they were even fighting over who would get what crayons. Nathan said to me that he often wonders: “why the kids still fight over the crayons and food when they all know there is plenty to go around.” Other kids that don’t participate in kids club often beg for the leftovers afterwards. We have to be very careful to keep the kids in line and under control throughout the time there. I must say that one of the more memorable moments of the trip thus far was when I had the opportunity to give the kids their food as they leave club. We give each kid a sandwich and an orange before they head home. But yesterday we had extra oranges so we got to give two to each child. Handing each one his or her own two oranges made me appreciate how I can eat whenever I like and how they truly can’t. Almost half of the oranges were very rotten and not edible, but still the children tried to take them and eat them since it was such a rare opportunity. We even had other children come up and beg for food as we were leaving.
That is pretty much it for the first day. I have a ton more to write about my last week but that it is all I have to say for the first day! Thank you so much for your continued prayer and support!
God Bless,
Josh
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