Hello Julle, dit is lekker hier in Kaapstad!

The Suspicious View

Bakin' Cookies

So I need your opinion. What would you do if armed forces (the South African Police) pulled up next to you and asked for identification, when all you were doing was taking a scenic walk? Yeah that was my problem too…

My friends and I decided one evening to walk to a scenic point, because some of the other students told us about a great view. Racism is a big problem here, especially when you have African Americans walking in a white neighborhood. They are immediately condemned as robbers or suspicious. Well, as we were walking through this neighborhood a family drove by and saw two of my friends, who are African American and gave them this look and kept on driving. My friend, Clever, then informed us that in less than five minutes we would have armed forces coming to see us. And like if he had timed it perfectly, five minutes later a policeman drove up and started asking us questions. The policeman was very nice and just asked us what we were doing. Once he realized that two of the “suspicious characters” were from America, he told us have a nice evening and kept on his way. It wasn’t a monumental situation or anything, but had my friends Clever and Sakhile been alone, they would have been asked for identification, been photographed, and asked to leave the neighborhood immediately.  Well, all in all we saw a beautiful view and met a nice cop, but it was just interesting to experience the distrust that is still extremely apparent here.

This past week has been a great one though! We are learning so much in our classes. The International Leadership team came in and shared about their lives and awesome work that the Lord is doing in different areas of the world, which was a special treat because the team only meets here every six years. However, the main focus in class was church movements and how to disciple. The way they plant churches here is quite different from how American churches work. In America, we have the pastor and the people come and here him speak, however here they encourage everyone to “pastor” his own church. They are called Discovery Bible Studies or DBS, they are like a small group. The process goes that one-person disciples 6-15 other people and then those people are sent out to disciple others. Many people have come to know Christ and they told us about one movement that took place in China, where two young girls started a movement and in 7 years nearly 2 million people came to Christ. I had never thought of church this way, but throughout the world this type of church planting is quite popular.

We started our simple church this week and headed to Ocean View for our first official outreach. The rest of the two months I am in Capetown, Ocean View will be the area I go and spend time in. It is so beautiful there. The children are so sweet and the people are friendly and open to talk. I met a lot of people this past visit and surprisingly, I made some connections through music. The people here love dancing and music, which is quite exciting for me. One of my other group members are hoping to start an after school dance program for all the kids. Drugs is a big issue here and we are hoping to provide an after school activity that will distract them from the kids selling drugs and at the same time sharing Christ. Tomorrow we will head back there and hopefully will get to talk to some of the elders in the Rastafarian community. Hopefully God will open some doors there for us. This week has been good and I am learning so much, God is definitely stretching me, but its great!

To finish out the week, we walked about 7 miles to visit a different beach, Nooerdhoek, and we stopped and ate at this amazing little café in Farm Village. The food is exquisite here, so fresh and delicious! Speaking about food, I tried Pop for the first time. Pop is made out of corn maize and is a staple food for many of the local’s diets. It doesn’t take like much but its pretty good with different seasonings. After our long walk, we came back to Africa House then got changed and headed to the main part of Capetown to hike up Table Mountain. It was a beautiful hike. Once we reached the top we watched the sunset and then the full moon rise over the city. It was beautiful! This next week is going to be a busy one, but again fun! I can’t wait to see what the Lord shows us this week!

Foundations Week

Rafting Competition: We Won =)

Build our Raft

Some of the delicious Braae Food

Well, the first week at CPx is coming to a close; I can’t believe how fast it came and went.  We began the week with a welcome Braae for all the CPx students and staff, which is similar to a bar-b-que, get together.  It was the first time where all the staff and students met and spent time together. We played games and icebreakers then ate delicious food, and began to get a feel for how the next couple of months are going to be. It was really exciting to get to meet everyone.  After the Braae, my cleaning group got the privilege to clean up the kitchen and I have to say I have never had so much fun cleaning. My group Mama D, Katrina, Shakeil, and I had more fun “cleaning” aka dancing, that the time just flew by.  It is so interesting how something as simple as dancing can bring people together. On Monday we began foundations week. Foundations week consists of learning about the different organizations within All Nations like child of promise, baby safe, and into Africa. Child of promise is geared towards the children in the different communities we go and reach out to. They encourage the children to follow the Lord and to help change their community from within as they grow up. Baby Safe is a group of ladies who reach out to the women in the poor communities who want to either have an abortion or are considering abandoning their newborns in gutters or sewers. Finally, Into Africa is a group who travels throughout Africa basically scouting out different areas to see any unreached people groups and seeing if it is a place All Nations can come and plant a church. In addition to hearing about the other organizations, the class got to give their testimonies and share how they came to All Nations. Hearing all the background stories on how they found Christ and came to All Nations was interesting. Each person had such a different background. The group has people from all over the world from ages 18-60 and it was so cool to see how we were all brought together. On Tuesday, we began visiting the different outreach places CPx is currently active in.  We started in Sunvalley, which is the area where All Nations is located. We all participated in a prayer walk, where we went around the community and prayed for the people and talked to some of the locals. The people here are extremely friendly and if you speak to them, they are quite open and ready to talk. So the conversations were many and the prayers were numerous.  As the week continued we visited two other outreach areas, which were Ocean View and Masipumelele or Masi. Both areas are some of the poorest communities in Capetown. Being in these areas makes you really realize how much we have and are blessed with. The first community we visited was Ocean View. We were put into different groups and again asked to walk around and pray for the community with the encouragement to talk to the people. We again walked around the community and prayed with a couple different people. The thing that really stood out to me was when we spoke with one of the elders of the Rastafarian community. In Ocean view, there is a group called Rastafarians, who are extremely “spiritual” and influential in the community. They believe in God, but don’t believe that Christ came to die for our sins. They also believe in “spiritual experiences” where the village gets together and smokes weed to gain more wisdom and get close to God. I have to say it was kind of interesting to see weed plants just growing all over the place and in people’s homes. The smell was slightly overwhelming. However, we were able to talk to one of the elders and are hoping to establish a relationship with them, to be able to talk to them and hopefully one day will be able to share Christ. I ask that you please pray that the group who visits there on a regular basis will be able to establish a relationship and that the people will open their hearts to Christ. The next community we visited was Masipumelele. This was one of the hardest places I have ever seen. It is hard for me to explain how these people live but the poverty is extreme. One of the leaders led us through and showed us the community. We got to again pray and talk to some of the people. My favorite part of Masi was the children. I was the whitest person in my group and as we walked around, I would have two or three kids just run up to me and jump on me and hang on as tight as they could, because they wanted a white friend. They were the most beautiful and loving kids I had ever experienced. Every time they came up to me my heart broke.  I realized so much that day about the love of children and being loved by these kids filled me with so much joy and excitement, I couldn’t help but to hope that I will get the opportunity to see them again. Literally, the most precious things I have ever experienced. These people have so little and yet they are so beautiful and welcoming. They have little to nothing, and they seem to be happier than some people who have everything. It makes you really appreciate all that we have. I ask that you might pray for their hearts as well to open to the gospel and for the people, drugs and gangs are extremely big in this community. Please pray for the people and that opportunities to get to know them will open.  We also did some group training and fun activities throughout the week. A group of us went to the circus, got to see some awesome animals and acrobats. On Thursday the entire group went to a camp called Back to Basics, where we began learning how to work together and got to get to know more about each other. We built rafts, played strategy games, and a monkey game. It was interesting to see all the different personalities and we learned how to work together, which was more difficult than we thought. It was really fun to get to know people’s personalities. Finally a small group of us we went to Fishoek, Capetown, which is one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever been to. We spent the day in the sun and swam in the ocean and played games on the beach. Capetown is so beautiful, I know I have said that multiple times, but I don’t think I can say it enough. Thank you so much for the prayers, I can’t wait to share with ya’ll everything that the Lord is going to do! 

Welcome to South Africa

Well, to let you guys know I made it safe and sound to South Africa. The trip was a long one, twenty-six hours to be exact, but it was completely worth the flight.  The beauty of South Africa is incomparable. The mountains, the beach, the water, and the people are some of the best I have experienced. Living in South Africa is like living in a postcard and you don’t even have to edit your pictures to make it look more appealing. South Africa is a place that is going to be extremely difficult to leave. God has been amazing even in the past day I have been here. It all began with my plane ride. I was asked to bring over about 16Ibs of books to a family over here for their schooling, which I was happy to do. The hard part was once I realized that I couldn’t fit them into my suitcase and had to carry them on. Normally taking items on like that is hard, but once you add jeans from you slightly overweight suitcase in addition to your boredom relieving activities it adds some poundage. So all in all I was carrying about 25Ibs, which doesn’t sound to heavy, but when you are rushing to try and make your connecting flight, it can really slow you down. However, God was really good, which He always is. On my first flight, I had a really nice man help me squeeze my bag into the overhead compartment, which sadly I couldn’t reach and furthermore, after the flight the guy sitting next to me, Romeo was his name, offered to help carry my bag to my terminal, which saved a lot of heartache.  It was a blessing to have someone help me out like that. In addition, I was stressing getting through customs and passport control once I reached Johannesburg. I only had about an hour layover before they started boarding my final flight to Johannesburg and the plane was pretty full of tourists and new people coming into South Africa, which meant I was going to have to hustle to make sure I got there in time to make my flight. Having 25Ibs of extra weight was going to slow me down a ton especially when moving through a thick crowd. But again, the Lord was good, I was at the check in counter and the lady had made an announcement about overweight carry-on’s, so I took my bag and went and had it weighed. It was definitely overweight.  She took my bag and checked it on for me at no additional cost, and I was able to get a bag to carry on the stuff I needed, so once I landed in Johannesburg I was able to get off the plane quickly, make it through passport control, re-check my bags and go through security with time to spare for my final flight to Capetown. It was just amazing to see how God watches out for us, even in the small things. Well, I finally made it to Capetown, grabbed all my bags, and headed down to meet Brandon Jones and Mark Proeger, who took me to the Africa house where I would be living. The drive there was quite interesting. I have driven on the opposite side of the road with the wheel on the right side of the car instead of the left, but didn’t notice as much because at that time I had never driven, but now as a “experienced” driver, this was a whole new world to me.  I was extremely happy I was not the one driving, but before I leave I think I am going to try. After a quick debrief from the house coordinator, I fell into bed utterly exhausted and welcoming sleep. The next morning, very early (5am), I met one of my roommates due to the jetlag from flying.  Her name was Evette and she was extremely friendly. Well we stayed up the rest of the night and after I unpacked, Brandon Jones, one of the leaders, showed me around and I got to spend time with him, his wife, and his daughter. We ate at this delicious little whole in the wall café, in a garden center, the food here is quite good. We then headed up to Floyd and Sally McClung’s, good family friends of ours and founders of All Nations. It was nice to see a familiar face and talk with them for a while. We then headed back and I finished out my second night by meeting more students, attempting to learn Afrikaans and introducing many of the students to York Peppermint Patties, only the best candy ever made.  These next five months are going to be good, I can’t wait to see what the Lord does! I really appreciate the support, if you are wondering I will post about once a week hopefully on Sunday’s. Thank-you again for your prayers!