Monday afternoon we traveled to Durban to meet up with the rest of our team. It's about a 2 hour drive- so there was a lot of chatting, and a bit of snoozing. We arrived at Addington School around 3pm or so. School had been out for a while and most of the elementary age kids had already gone home. The Durban team had been spending a lot of time at this school during the day- tutoring, helping in the classrooms, etc.
When we arrived, we spent an hour or so getting to know the kids- about 300 or so. The girls loved singing and dancing for us, and the boys loved football. We gathered everyone into the main auditorium and sang our VBS songs, and the story of David and Goliath. The kids were very attentive during the story time. We had an invitation and several came to know God. We had to cut our program short a bit because the kids needed to be heading home before it got too late in the afternoon, so we passed out sandwiches and sent them home. They didn't want to leave with out us though- we had to get in the busses and leave before they would all leave.
We had a few free hours before we could do our street ministry, so we walked along the beach for a while and ate dinner. I was really feeling awful by this time; whatever cold I had was progressing into some kind of infection. I really wanted to go back to the condos to get some extra rest, but that wasn't happening.
The gal in charge of the street ministry gave us a bit of a "what to do and not do" talk. We made sure that we were not bringing anything with us that we wouldn't be prepared to just give away. Because of this- we don't have any pictures to show of this part of our trip. We split up in groups of 10 or so and hit the streets of Durban.
Durban has a huge orphan population that lives on the street. After meeting with some of these kids, we realized that most of the time these kids parents have died, or one of them dies and the other becomes abusive so the children run away. There were also a lot of illegal immigrants- from Tanzania and Kenya- trying to make a better life for themselves. We met a group of kids that were high on construction grade glue. It was heartbreaking- one of them was only about 7 years old, the others were jr high or high school age. Our group was able to minister to two people in particular in this group of kids- one was a girl who was in an unhealthy relationship and the other was a boy who came to know Christ that night. We told them about a local outreach church nearby that they could go to get help.
This was the one part of the trip that I was not interested in at first- I didn't feel comfortable doing this and I really didn't feel physically up to it. But, God opened our eyes to an entire population of people that we never knew existed. It's hard to put into words the events that took place that evening, but God moved in a mighty way on those streets. We'll never know what actually came from meeting and talking with those kids, but we know God's will was done. It shows that God moves in mysterious ways, and uses us in ways that we never knew possible.
