I'm so sorry for keeping everyone in the dark for so long, its probably been over a month since I last blogged. yikes! I'm truly sorry. Well first semester for FYM is over and I'm saying goodbye to J-Bay, most of my ministry team, and the township I have come to love.  I do regret not telling you much about the families that our ministry team had visited because they were truly beautiful people; God did so much in them and through them this last spring (or fall for you).  But I suppose I could sum up some of the people that we visited.

Too Big of a Heart

The first day that our ministry team went into the township our leader took us to Hester, a big woman with a huge heart both figuratively and literally. She suffers from a very large heart that presses against her lung and gives her a lot of pain. Despite Hester's health conditions she  helps take care of the AIDs patients around the township. Every Wednesday morning she gets up and walks all over the township to visit the sick and give them food parcels.  I would also go so far to say that she is the Grandma of Jeffrey's Bay because every time she has extra bread or has made a large amount of food she has children and youth coming to her house and asking for bread or cake and she can never resist giving out this food.  So as God pressed on Hester's heart to help her community God pressed on our ministries heart to help Mama Africa. And God showed up! One day we prayed for her when she was having pains in her chest and 1 2 3 the pain was gone! Not only that but also Hester had a son that was taken from her at birth and she has been searching for Him since then, and he was taken in the 70's and guess what? He was found! God is sooooo good. Our team was so honored to be apart of this miracle! We were also able to help take care of her garden and plant new vegetables in her garden. Not only did we get to be God's hands and feet towards Hester but she was also God's hands and feet towards us. Hester taught us how to make Vetkoek, which is a deep fried bread and we just found rest in her house.  We will miss you mama Africa!

Gloria

One day , we were wondering around the township and we came across this house that we thought was another ladies house that we had visited before, but it ends up that we had never visited her house before. Fortunately God had His hand in this, another lady named Gloria came up to us and told us she was struggling to feed her baby, because she wasn't lactating anymore. So we went to see the baby and the child was 7 months old but she still looked like a new born baby! It pained us to see her dressed in layers of clothing so she didn't look like she was as small as she was. She had horrible bed head and later we found out that her diaper rash was even worse. Well we didn't know what to do or say so we prayed for the baby and told her we would see what we could do. Later that day we found out that the team that was in J-Bay last year met Gloria when Angel (that's the baby's name) was only a few months old and they had found Gloria drunk with Angel, not knowing how to take care of her at all.  So after one of the leaders learned  that we had found Gloria we were able to take the leaders to her house and show the baby  to them.  They then got a hold of a social worker that runs an orphanage  and took her to meet Gloria and talk to her about Angel. Gloria agreed that she couldn't take care of Angel anymore and allowed the social worker to take Angel. Thank the Lord that we were able to get Angel out of that situation! How could a mother take care of her child in such a way? Gloria gets money from the government for her children and instead of spending it on the children she spends it on herself? Most likely for drugs and alcohol. This made me so angry and mad, how could she do something like that? But then God softened my heart towards Gloria. Gloria was in more need of help then Angel was, granted Angel was on the verge of malnutrition but Gloria was the cause of it Angel's situation was a cry for help.  So our team started visiting her ever so often making sure she was doing alright.  At first I think she was really hesitant and didn't trust us at all but as we continued to come and play with her older child Blessings she started softening up to us.  Finally God moved and we saw Gloria at church, I was taken off guard at first and had to give her a good stare to make sure it was her but sure enough it was. She went up to get prayer for Angel and then she later asked me to pray for her to stop drinking! Woot! That was an exciting day and after that whenever we visited her she was so open and the last day we went to her house we brought her a bible in her own language and we read like five chapters out of Matthew.  Unfortunately I feel like we left our relationship too early and that we were finally getting somewhere with her. But I'm very confident that the team staying in Jeffreys Bay will continue to visit her and watch out for her but please pray for her and that she will make wise decisions and be able to truly have a close relationship with God and fight her love for the drink.

Thelma

 Whenever a white missionary walks into a township in Africa most likely there will be cute little black children following you wherever you go.  And that's how we met Thelma. One day we were walking around trying to find a house that we could go visit on a regular basis and these kids had been following us everywhere,  at one point they left us and we were wondering around for a while and then we saw them again at this house and our team got the bright idea to knock on that house's door.  So we did and we met this amazing woman named Thelma. She was so sweet, loved to socialize and spoke really good English.  The first day we met her she was talking about how she had wanted to start reading her bible again and praying. Thelma also worked for a crazy professor that sold pigeon vitamins, or something to do with pigeons. Later we went to visit her at work and the professor invited us into his home it was really weird but interesting because he believed in all of this eastern religion which is rather unusual for South Africa because its one of the most evangelized countries in Africa.  Anyways Thelma was working at this place and she mixed chemicals that were very questionable and she didn't wear gloves or a mask and it didn't seem healthy at all and I so wanted her to get out of there.  So we prayed for Thelma many times and when we were just starting to say goodbye, we go to Thelma's house and find out that she went to this bible study or something similar to that and got right with God and she said she was just praying all the time and reading her bible and she didn't want to work at the professors house anymore because the chemicals weren't good for her and just everything seemed to be falling into place for her so amazing! But oh how I will miss our talks with Thelma.

Khulisa

So last year our ministry leader  helped start a feeding center for a lady named Noma. Noma feeds I think 14 children every morning before school, these children come from two different families, one of them was an orphaned family from Lesotho and the other family was just really poor. So Noma wanted to start a bible study for the children that she was feeding.  Unfortunately we didn't decide to take on this challenge until later in the semester so we didn't get to spend much time with the children there but we did get in some good hugs, laughs, bible stories, crafts and games.  If I were to regret one thing from our ministry time it would probably be not starting the bible study sooner then we did but hopefully someone from the J-Bay team will continue the bible study and invest in the children's lives.  

 In honesty I don't feel like our team did much except pray and walk into people's houses. No it was God that did all the work He provided so much and He blessed our ministry in more ways then we could have managed. So all glory to God and thank you father for bringing these people into my life I will miss them and they will always have a special place in my heart.