Clare

I just stayed in a rural village called Clare for the last week and a half. I stayed with a woman named Minah and her husband and her two children Philile (18) and Siyabonga (8). I absolutely fell in love with these two girls. Philile spoke very good English and we spent a lot of time talking about her life and boys and faith.. it was incredible. She's absolutely beautiful inside and out and I just so wish for her to rise up out of the typical future for a young rural South African woman. She has a boyfriend in University who comes to visit once or twice a year ... this already raises huge flags. South African men are not the most faithul and trustworthy in relationships. Siyabonga on the other hand couldn't speak any English or even any Siswati, so we used a lot of hand gestures and pointing. She would try to talk to me in Tsonga anyway and would try to talk very slow for me to understand, but jibberish is jibberish no matter how slow it is. But we really connected. We slept together, her usually ON me. And she always woke very early to be in school by 7. I would wake up also and help her get ready: clasp her shoes, fold her collar, comb her hair... it was one of my favourite times of the day.

I stayed in Clare to really push forward with a feeding program we're starting up in the area, including 13 villages and 700 kids. As exciting as it is that these 700 kids will soon be receiving a meal a day, it is definitely frustrating work. I wanted to cry multiple times a day trying to get the details organized. There are a lot of challenges that come with South Africa: expectations, power hunger, lack of initiative, church politics (I guess this is everywhere) ... but when all these things arise when working together to care for the orphans in these communities, the frustration becomes large scale.

"And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday"
Isaiah 58:10

True fasting.