The last official part of our “job” in South Africa was Holiday Club. iThemba Lethu has basically a day camp style program during the week of summer holidays (remember, southern hemi, it’s summer for them!). We were thrown for a bit of a loop when we found out the day before Holiday Club started that our team of seven would be split into two for programming at two locations. Even more sadly, Jonathan and I would be split due to logistics.
We set out Tuesday morning to our respective locations: Jonathan, Jodie, Lisa and Natalie to one school and Tami, Kinsey and me to another school. I was really nervous. You know that feeling when you could cry at any moment, that’s how I felt all morning long. We had only five children for a very long time, then we were told that due to the numbers of children, we were going to join the team at the other school. Praise the Lord! The five children we had with us were great, but coming up with six hours of fun for five children can be difficult, especially when we didn’t know any Zulu other than Sawubona (hello).
Upon our arrival, Jonathan was giving the message based on Daniel:
These three days were filled with some great fun: music, games, messages, small group time and amazing skits created and put on by the children. They LOVED skits! It was so great to see them perform for us. I was impressed with their creativity and with the depth of understanding of the topic.
A real highlight for me was this fellow; he never told me his name, but each day he would meet me at the door, take my hand and my backpack and laptop bag and carry everything for me. I tried to get him to stop but he wouldn’t take no for an answer-everyday! Then he would hug me! Then we would sit down and talk, but he mostly just wanted to hold my hand. We can hold hands anytime, buddy, anytime. Here we are on the last day of club:
The theme for this club was “Overcoming Obstacles” more than anything, I think I was the one who received the most “teaching” during these days. It was encouraging to see the children engage with their youth workers and the parent workers and to even see a teacher come by to see how things were going. What a gift to be part of this local movement of God’s work.
Oh, and Jonathan had quite the crowd of boys and girls on the last day. They were teaching him Zulu. I still think it’s great that he had such a following:
