A week in the life……

I actually wrote this blog a couple of weeks ago now.  I have some pictures I wanted to include with this but haven’t been able to get them to load.  So I am just going to send without pictures….

This week in Swaziland……

Wanted to give you a glimpse into some of the day to day life here in Swazi.  We have had a great week!  Monday we took a family/school “field trip” to Ngwenya Glass.  This is an amazing place up near the northern border of Swaziland and South Africa.  They actually buy glass from Swazi’s, many of them women who gather old bottles from the dumps, trash, alleys and roadside.  This is a way for people to make some money to help support their families.  Then they use this glass to make wonderful, beautiful works of art!  We were able to watch one of the master glass blowers and his assistants as they made a beautiful, fragile, glass bowl out of a blob of molten glass.  Amazing!  There are also lots of little shops that all sell crafts made by Swazi’s.  Oh, and the girls’ favorite part….there is a chocolate shop where you can buy a tiny little cup of melted chocolate with a straw!  They all had chocolate from head to toe, but they were happy!

We went from there to a big shipping company in Matsapha to help unload a container from the States.  What fun!!!  There were lots of clothes, shoes and other items for the children at the Care Points.  

But the big, exciting thing was boxes and boxes of books!!  It has been a dream of mine to figure out a way to have a mobile library, a “Book Mobile”, to be able to go around to all the care points and let the kids check out books.  So it was kind of amazing to suddenly be given so many children’s books.  We brought all the boxes home to our house to sort and categorize and store, and the girls were immediately going through each box, examining each book.  They have sorted them a million times this week, with piles moving from one girl to the other as they practically devour a book at a time.  Tuesday morning I got up and went to make coffee and realized that I didn’t hear any of the girls.  (They usually all get up about 6:00 and play and make a lot of noise until school starts.)  I started looking and found them all in the hall with the books….reading.  Later that day, after school they were swimming and playing in the pool.  I was reading a book and “watching” them.  Pretty soon I realized that there was only one girl left in the pool.  The rest of them had decided they would rather go in and read!  Does a Mama’s heart good to see her girls so excited about reading!

Also in this container were boxes and boxes of “american” food that this sweet church had sent for us “missionaries”.   The lunches this week have been so fun!  Macaroni and Cheese, Chef Boy Ardee Ravioli, Campbells and Progresso Soups!  Quaker snack bars, Chips Ahoy cookies, Ritz crackers, Frosted mini-wheats and Oreos are more of the favorites!  

On Thursday the Clyburns, the McAdams’ and three of the Swazi AIM staff headed out to Gege (“gay-gay”).  There is a care point there that AIM has just started helping out.  The pastor, Ronald, and his wife, Esther, are actually from Zambia. They brought their young familly to Swaziland to help with the ongoing orphan crisis here.  They are beautiful and amazing people.  Our goal was to get some basic information on each of the kids that regularly comes to this care point.  With this information and a picture of each child, we are able to create a “profile” of each one and then Children’s HopeChest can get this information to the church that agrees to sponsor Gege Care Point.  That church can then work on getting each profiled child a “sponsor” who will send $35/month to help with the costs of food, education, discipleship, medical care, clothes, shoes….whatever we can do for the kids with the money we have.

It was a great day, with a picnic on the way on a mountainside overlooking more of beautiful Swaziland. Once we got there the younger girls painted fingernails and played games with the kids.  Katie helped the Swazi team as they filled out profile information on each of the 138 children.  Allison and Steve took profile pictures of each child and Mark and I tried to direct the kids to the next “station” for processing and finally to the “kitchen” for a meal of pap and beans.   We were all sunburned, dirty and tired by the end of the day, but so happy to have met so many beautiful kids and amazing women and men who care for them each day.

The girls have school each morning from 9:00 until about 12:30 usually.  They love it and almost always are there in the school room before the teachers!  On days when we travel to care points, they do their work in the car on the way, or double up the days before and after.  They have one hour of “study time” each evening and really look forward to helping each other study, memorize and finish up homework.  They are all doing amazingly well in all the subjects and it is so fun to see how much the younger girls are learning as they try to keep up with the two older girls.  Allison is such a great teacher, and I am learning a lot by watching her teach.  I have started teaching Science to give her a little bit of a break.  And I try to grade as many papers as I can.  But Allison says I am too easy on them…..I think she re-grades a lot of what I do to make sure I didn’t let them get away with too much!  🙂

I also got the chance this week to meet Echo and Harry VanderWal.  They have started The Luke Commission, a medical ministry, here in Swaziland.  Harry is a doctor and Echo is a Physician’s Assistant.  They have a mobile clinic that they take out into the bush to different locations, usualy twice a week.  They are an amazing family (four young boys) and such an asset to the people of Swaziland and to us!  They are more than willing to help us with any medical questions/problems that come up as we visit the care points, and are helping us devise a system for meeting some of the medical needs of the women and children on a more regular basis.

In between all this, Steve and Mark made some food runs, delivering food to Care Points and getting maize to the mill to be ground.  Allison started working on getting correspondance from churches and sponsors sorted so that the D-team can deliver it to the kids at the care points.  I got to talk with Julie Anderson about the Timbali Crafts ministry she directs.  This is a way for women who volunteer at the care points (bomake and gogo’s) to make some money.  They sew purses and other small items which Julie sells to visiting teams and ships back to the States to be sold there.  All the profit goes to the women, and is used for food, medicine and school fees usually.  I agreed to start Timbali projects at some of the newer care points that haven’t been a part of Timbali yet.  I can’t wait to see what beautiful things the women will come up with.  I will be sure to post pictures as soon as we have some ideas of what we will be selling.  

As you can see, life here is seldom boring.  And certainly never the same thing two days in a row!  We have really enjoyed getting to be together more as a family.  All those years of Steve working retail, nights and weekends were really tough.  It has been so nice to have him around, for me and for the girls!

Thank you for keeping us in your prayers and for supporting us in this work.  We would not and could not be here without you.