Violence in Joburg

Well I only have a week left in South Africa! Its crazy how fast it has gone...I don't know how many of you have heard about what's been going on in Joburg, here's an article in case you haven't...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24705508/

I just wanted to ask everyone to be praying for the situation, a lot of the youth we work with are foreigners and some of the violence has spread to the inner-city where they live...we're suppose to be having a going away party this coming Friday at Troyeville but we don't know if we'll be able to if its not safe.

Anyway, that's all the update I have for now, I might not post again until I get home, I want to put some pictures up of the youth at Troyeville sometime soon though.

KwaZulu-Natal

This past week has been awesome…I just got back from a five day trip to KwaZulu-Natal, a rural Zulu part of the country about five hours from Joburg. Me, Kelsey, and Russell (another American that helps out at Troyeville) were able to go with Pastor Cheryl from Troyeville and some of her family. We went around to some rural villages and passed out clothes, blankets, & toys that had been donated to Troyeville. One man Cheryl knows holds a church of about 40 people in his home in a village called Emmaus, very near the Lesotho border…





…we visited him on Thursday and brought a bunch of the donations to his family. He’ll help distribute them to members of his congregation. Fortunately, he’s getting a new church built soon. On Friday we visited an orphanage of about 40 older kids in another village called Qua Qua and determined what kind of stuff we needed to bring them on the next trip down. Saturday we went on a pretty strenuous 12k hike in the Drakensburg Mountains, a very beautiful mountain range in this part of the country that I would describe as somewhat of a cross of the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains, here’s a few pictures from the hike even though the pictures don’t really do it justice.







On Sunday we went to yet another church and after the service we passed out blankets to the whole congregation, at which point everyone (even the pastor) were so happy they got up and started singing and dancing.

It was a great experience overall, I got to see another beautiful part of the country and experience a rural African village, plus it’s always eye opening to see the poverty and need of a place like this firsthand. Its incredible how diverse South Africa is, you can go from modern, urban city to urban slums to rural villages in a matter of hours and encounter 10 languages along the way. For example, nearly all of the tourists in Drakensburg were rich, white Afrikaans people, staying in huge resorts just miles down the road from Zulu huts.