Wow we’re officially in the nations!! So lets recap the last few days!!
We left Georgia early on the morning of October 4th, from there we flew to Istanbul Turkey where we had a 17 hour lay over! After that, we flew into Johannsburg, South Africa and took a long bus ride to Eswantini. Finally after 58 hrs of travel we got to Nsoko Eswantini, praise God! The name of this country changed from Swaziland to Eswantini just a few years back. Because of that many locals still call it Swazi, so we do this as well to honor them!
Durning Swazi we are spilt squad by men and women so on our way to Nsoko we dropped the guys in the city of Manzini and drove hours out to where we are! Nsoko is in the bush of Africa, it is more rural without a large city around. There is not much here – no service, no washing machines, not many luxuries but a lot of beauty!
The first few days here were spent getting over jet lag, get familiar with our base, getting used to all sharing a room and getting rid of many bugs and critters in our stuff. Later in the week we started our ministry at carepoints!
Carepoint ministry is the main form of ministry we will be doing in Swazi. In Swazi, there are extremely high rates of AIDS, orphans, poverty etc. AIM has set up what they call carepoints all throughout the country to help provide love as well as tangiable help to the issues that plague this place. At these carepoints children come after school to receive a meal, lessons on the Bible, grief counseling (as many of them have lost loved ones), play time, and just to be seen, known, and loved. So each of our girl teams have been sent each to a different carepoint. We will continue to go each week to teach, love on, and minister to these children.
The children don’t get out of school until about 2:00 so mornings at the carepoints look different everyday. Typically we will go out onto prayer walks two times a week. During these we go around the community that the carepoint is in and take time to encourage and minister to the adults and others from that area. Swazi is a Christian nation, so many people have heard the gospel, but we still get to go sit down at their homes and encourage them. Sometimes with storeis or testimonies, as well as sharing scriptures and listening to them. Our heart is to encourage, listen and always pray and just point them back to the person of Jesus. On other mornings we work around the carepoint getting ready for lessons, upkeeping the garden and whatever the leader (or what they call the shepherded of the carepoint) has for us to do. After the kids get there we play, teach, and feed them! We attend carepoints Tuesday – Friday, then Saturday – Sunday are days to sabbath and attend church. Then on Mondays we have ATL or “ask the Lord” days where we do just that and seek out how the Lord wants us to do that day. For this time in Nsoko these look a little different since our restrictions on leaving base are more strict we have chosen these to be ATL days for our squad. So we ask the Lord how He wants us to minister to each other on mondays!! Thats a little overview of the stricture of our time here in Swazi!
So far our time here has been sweet with it just being the girls from my squad! It has been such a gift getting to grow closer with my team and see the Lord bringing deeper unity to my team. Ministry has just begun but so far it has been good! In all honesty childrens ministry is not exactly where my heart is. So while I love kids, over a month of children’s ministry at carepoints sounds overwhelming, but I know that the Lord has so much to teach me in that. These next weeks will be continual opportunities to press into the Lord for my strength, Joy, and ability to be present. I am excited to see how the Lord continues to grow my heart and use carepoint ministry to reveal more of Himself!!
Thank you guys so much for your continued prayers, they are so needed and much appreciated! Im not sure when this blog will be posted due to a lack of service, but thank you guys so much for being so faithful to partner with me in this. I a, so excited for what the Lord is going to do.
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