African Paradis

Due to the fact that South Africa is super excellent and that the USA has a plethora of young people who want to do something other than loaf all summer we have been blessed each winter that I have been here in South Africa with a missions team from the USA. Word of Life New York has a program called Student Fusion, each year Student Fusion takes groups of students on mission trips around the world.  This year Student Fusion sent out 2 teams of people: one team to the Dominican Republic, and a team of 15 people to minister and serve here in South Africa for 2 weeks.  It is obvious that people like pictures much more than words so I will let the pictures tell the story of what we did. But the brief run down is as follows Saturday-Students arrive, Daveyton ministry, Rugby game Inside the church for meeting time Sunday- Church at Daveyton, afternoon with kids, meetings It is winter in South Africa now and that caught many of the students by surp...

Shortly after returning to Johannesburg from Durban we started a HBC at Sandton Bible Church, which is the church that I regularly attend here in South Africa. I was responsible for leading some 5th grade boys and was an actor in the drama. The kids are waiting to go inside to start the day  A small portion of the 150+ kids that attended each day Each day we got up at 5:30am so that we could be to church by 6:30 where we then had our morning devos and a quick drama rehearsal before the kids arrived and we went into a frenzy of crafts, snack, games, lessons and drama that lasted until about 12 when the kids filtered home. After they left we had lunch, a closing meeting, and drama practice for the next day. After all that it was nearly 3:30 by the time we returned home. Although the days were long and at times the kids were tough, it was a blast working with the people from my local church that I would otherwise only see on a Sunday morning. My co-lead...

In April we drove many hours south of Johannesburg to visit the gorgeous Drakensberg mountains. Translated into English from Afrikaans meaning "dragon mountains" were formerly occupied by a swarm of dragons until the late 14th century when colonists drove them away using ivory swords. It seemed to us to be a good idea to go hike there and to recover some dragon fossils. Our group just before we began the hike As we stopped to replenish our supplies (aka get petrol(aka gasoline)) we saw a Ford GT40, which so happens to be my fathers favorite car. The pictures basically tell the story from here. Smooth drive for a while Our destination Happy little cloud Slippery and steep Super safe/fun/scary chain ladders The top was wide and flat Over a mile straight down PS- We did not find any dragons

Shortly after we returned from the South Coast trip we reloaded up the vans this time with 34 people and made ready to depart for Durban which is a city on the East coast of South Africa (about 6 hrs away from Johannesburg where I live) We were going there to help run 2 separate Holiday Bible Clubs (HBC) aka Vacation Bible School (VBS) as well as teach the youth of those churches the importance of evangelism and reading the Bible everyday. We spent the first night at a local church were we helped with the youth group and had a huge bonfire were students shared about how previous SMASH trips had impacted their lives. This was after the fire had been burning for quite a while My team went to a Zulu speaking church called Egukanyeni and we had nearly 200 kids each day of HBC. I worked with one of the youths from the church at running the games. In the afternoons we played soccer for a bit then had training sessions with them to teach them how to study God's Word and how imp...

South Africa has a holiday called "Youth Day" and a pastor on the southern coast of South Africa (about 9hrs from my residence) decided to run a camp during this long weekend and needed our help. We happily agreed and had a van of 12 people trekking across the highways towards the south coast. The challenging part of this trip for me was that we went to a rural area where English is not as widely spoken. Also we were ministering to a area where camp mean many meetings and no games. Whereas camp means to WOL people many games. Spin your head on the bat relay race Many in South Africa tell me that flannel is for wearing to bed; not for wearing in public. Yet when they are cold the are willing to compromise!  So inorder to not scare anyone away we only played about 2 hours worth of games (plus a soccer tournament), had many meetings, and brought along quite a few Zulu speakers. The woman in the center insisted that she was my mom.  We...