Thank you for your prayers, I am feeling a  lot better, and only have a cough.

This is what we live in...

These are the people we minister to...
Well this week is kind of finally settling in that I am in Africa, and this is what I am doing for the next 7-8 months. This week I started out in Mamalodes (sounds like Mama- Low-Dees, the place I did the whole first week I was here in Safrica. It's a place that is about 1 million people with about ¼ living in fairly decent houses, that might classify as lower class housing in Namerica, (I've decided to start throwing the abbreviations onto the words) and the other part living in shanties that you normally see in Africa townships, or India or Mexico. So we are working in the poorer part that is right next to the mountains (or hills compared to Alaska) with a Cresh (daycare/after school program), kind of like a boys and girls club. This week on Monday however I did some street ministry, with three of my co-mishes, where we walked the streets next to the Cresh, stopping to talk with people, who wanted to talk and pray for them (and there's a lot of them), but we ran into some kids who were wheel barrowing some beer crates up to a house/store, and we asked if we could help them out, so we followed them up to the house and ran into this elderly man named Sam, who is married and has one kid who goes to the Cresh, but he just opened up to us, telling how he moved from a rural farm area to Mamalodes, but had no job except to sell some beer and food, but he felt (and I could see it) terrible for selling it, because he didn't think Jesus wanted him doing that. So we got to speak some truth into his life and told him that some of us would come back and visit him. It turned out to be a great day.
    Tuesday I went to Eskom (sounds like S-Com) for the first time. Which is about 25 min away from Alabanza and it is another Cresh/Street "ministry" outreach, but seems a lot more crowded but a lot less people. It also went pretty well, 2 of the guys were working on building a latrine for the cresh and were bricking up the side of the hole, and it was pretty funny watching the little 3-6 year olds at the cresh bringing bricks to the guys working, I also did some street walking with a few other of my team members, and helped a man named Trust carry water to his house and got to hear his story, then prayed for him. (I tried to see him again on Wed but he wasn't there) then we got to help carry some kids home who have no parents and are living by themselves, which was hard to see especially the littlest one who is malnutritioned and has a bad cough and also has a sangoma string around his belly and neck. A sangoma is a witch doctor/traditional healer, who will tie strings around babies to signify that they are dedicated to the ancestors. It's frustrating when you want to just cut them off but can't due to cultural differences, and how ineffective your testimony would be after that. But we prayed over the children and are hoping for the best for them.
    Thursday I stayed home because I felt the Lord telling me during my quiet time to stay back and pray for my team members and people back home, so I did and it was an amazing time. I got crazy sunburned for staying on the roof for 4 hours but it was completely worth it.
    A cool God story from Wed is back at Eskom the guys working on the latrine had run out of bricks on Tues and needed to get more, but didn't know where to get them at, and when we got there on Wed morning, some guys in a huge flatbed truck showed up with bricks saying that they were supposed to drop bricks off, no one had made an order or anything. It was just some street guys that dropped bricks off. The Holy Spirit works in amazing ways.
    Other good things that have happened, our Jeffrey's Bay Team (JBay) made it down on Saturday safely with no car troubles, the car troubles that we have been dealing with still allow us to go to "ministry" everyday. Our team is unifying little by little.

(The title of the blog is a little inside joke between our group about how women are married in swaziland, by an offering of cows for a women, an average woman is worth 20ish cows)