Never in my life would I have thought that I would be visiting a prison in South Africa! Well last week our team came together with two different organizations to promote Beat the Drum in summerset east. Summerset east is a small town near a rather large mountain just three hours away from J Bay; it's, for the most part a farming

community.  Beat the Drum is an HIV/AIDs awareness program with a focus on abstinence. Its mostly for jr high and high school ages and basically we go into a school show a movie called "Beat the Drum" and then the team spends a whole week going over curriculum.  We went to around four schools and we had two community outreaches. From what I hear the schools were a great success and at the end of the week a lot of the students came to the Lord and got tested for HIV/AIDs.  But, I wasn't apart of a school, I was apart of the summerset community outreach.  

    Like I said before never would I have imagined myself in a prison in South Africa but there I was Monday morning walking into a prison.  Luckily it wasn't at all like what I imagined, there was no strip search or these tough gangster men whistling at us five girls. In fact it was really low key and chill. We went in, left our bags in an office, which was then locked, and walked into this semi-small hall where a group of prisoners were watching the beat the drum movie.  Once they were finished our teammate Doleigh went up and God spoke through him, he is such a man of God, and at the end over forty prisoners gave their life to God. It was so amazing to be apart of!

    The rest of the week we went to different farming communities and showed the movie and gave a call to abstinence (for some this was a call to get married instead of "shacking up") and a call to accept Jesus into your heart.  Every farm we went to more then one p

erson stood up for both calls; it  was amazing and I feel extremely blessed to be apart of this team but I'm not going to lie it was hard at times. Sometimes I felt like I wasn't really doing anything because I didn't speak to the crowd at all and most of the time everything that was being said was in Afrikaans, plus I was sick  for most of it. I just didn't feel like I was doing anything but at the same time I knew I was doing something because I was praying and being a support system to those who were talking.  Well, I guess I shouldn't say I felt helpless because we did get to hang out with some children for awhile because they were too young to watch the movie. That was really fun! We were at a small primary school on a farm and we played games with them and we told them a story and just loved on them. So many of these children had already been exposed to drugs, alcohol and sex. One of the girls had been raped and she was still in grade two or three; she was so sweet, it broke my heart to hear that something like that had already happened to her.  

    Over all God had his hand on Beat the Drum and it was great to get to know some of the people in summerset east and from the other organizations that were helping with Beat the Drum.