First of all - The name of this place is most definitely not pronounced as it is spelled. Silly, I know.
Here is where I will go into a bit more detail about what we did in Worcester, South Africa during outreach. We were staying at this place called Kibbutz El Shammah which is right next to the neighborhood knows as Roodewal (I think that's how it is spelled).
There were about 4 or 5 of these circles of flats in the area. One of the first days we were there, we were just walking through the community and we most definitely attracted quite the crowd. And by crowd, I mean over 100 children. Seriously. We were surrounded. They fought just to hold our hand and wanted to know our names and they just wanted to be with us. After a couple days, whenever we would walk through the flats, there was always at least 5 kids who would yell out your name no matter where you went.
Durning the morning we would split off into different groups - one group went and worked in the primary school teaching English classes. Some went to help out in the preschool, and some did practical work around the area.
There were a couple days when I had the opportunity to go help out in a 2nd grade class. The teacher's name was Vera and she is pretty much amazing. Her class is full of 43 crazy 2nd graders. There was one day in particular that I got to help a couple tables with math. It was so much fun to be able to teach them how to do something and then watch them actually be able to understand it and do it for themselves. Then they wanted to go help their friends do the problems. It also helped me to learn how to count to 10 in Afrikaans real well.
When we first got there, we were asked if we could lead their church service that Sunday which was about 4 days away. So we planned and put together a church service and everyone was able to be involved. We had worship, testimonies, a drama, and a message. It was the first time that I led a couple worship songs to a larger group of people like that. It was so cool to be able to step out in that way and the whole service went really well.
Each day for a week we would go on a prayer walk through the flats. One day, 3 older ladies waved at me to come over to them and they asked me if I could pray for them. So I asked what they wanted prayer for and they told me simply for financial provision. Nothing specific, just simply that. So I did and then I went on my way. The next day at the same time, we went on our prayer walk again and those same 3 ladies were sitting in the same spot so I immediately went over to them to say hello and they were excited to see me and they had stories to tell me. One of them didn't have enough money for a loaf of bread (a loaf of bread cost about 7 South African Rands which is about 1 US dollar). She was telling me that after I had prayed for them, her son came over to her and gave her enough money that she needed for a loaf of bread to feed her and the children she watches over. Then another lady was telling me a long (and somewhat hard to understand) story of how she didn't have enough money to pay her electric bill for the month. Long story short, the lady that was helping her as she was trying to pay offered to pay the rest of her bill for her. So her electric bill was payed for the rest of the month. God provides.
Wow, as I write all of this, so many more stories keep coming to my mind about what we did - we did a lot.
On one of our last nights there, we held an open air in the flats. The stage was the back of a bakkie (aka - truck). So we had some worship, some of the girls performed a dance which was so great and Helena and I gave our testimonies. It was hard to speak to a group of people with a translator because you have to keep stopping and starting but I really liked it for how nervous I was about it at first. I've never been the biggest fan of speaking in front of people but it wasn't so bad when I actually got up there and started speaking.
Even though it was a hard place to be, we were able to develop a lot of different relationships with the people at the schools, at the Kibbutz and in the flats. There are so many more things that we did in Worcester. One thing that was brought up here that we realized for each place we went was that our group was hand-picked to be in the place we were at that time. God's timing is perfect. As we were driving away, there was a huge line of little children screaming at us saying goodbye followed by the rest of the staff at the Kibbutz waving us goodbye.
One of my favorite days was when we got to climb Table Mountain in Cape Town. Even though I totally destroyed my pants, it was so much fun and it was so beautiful no matter how cold it was at the top. We conquered that mountain together. Definitely one of my highlights.
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