Wow the past month has been pretty crazy. I'm really sorry that it's taken me so long to finally get a blog up; I'll be putting things up on a regular basis.  So it started off with a week of training camp in Gainesville Georgia.  It was filled with team builders and lessons on spiritual warfare, listening prayer, and other fun things.  We even slept in a tent for a whole week and showered using a gardening hose!  When the week was over and we had been commissioned we loaded everyone up onto busses and drove to the airport.  It was pretty relieving to know we had finally made it to the point of actually leaving the country, but then we had to go through security and stand in lines and eat a hurried lunch before we finally boarded the airplane on our way to Germany and then South Africa. 

Once we made it to the Germany airport it felt like we were so close to actually being in Africa, ha-ha little did we know. We had a 16 hour layover in the Frankfort airport and they wouldn't even let us into the terminal until a few hours before our plane left. We explored every possible thing there, we ate, shopped, took lots of silly pictures, took a hot shower, and by this time everyone was extremely tired and we all pretty much had our sleeping bags with us so we just sprawled out on the floor and on chairs and took some really nice naps.

The plane ride over to Africa felt extremely long and after I had already taken some sleep aid medication they decided to feed us dinner at 12:30 at night.  All I wanted to do was sleep and the flight attendant was trying to ask me if I wanted pasta or beef or something of the sort.  I told him I wanted chicken, which I think confused him a bit.  Amber who was sitting next to me on the plane had to help me out, it was a pretty funny situation.

We finally made it to South Africa on a gorgeous sunny Friday morning.  A guy named Albert took me and some others to Alabanza which is the home stead that we stayed at while we were in Johannesburg.  It didn't even take an hour to see God working in our lives.  The van we were riding in was having some issues; the brakes weren't really working at all.  As we were flying down the road trying not to hit cars Albert was trying to tell us that he had control and it wasn't a big deal at all.  Then when we got to Alabanza we told us how scared he was and that God must have gotten us there safety because we really didn't have any brakes at all.   We were finally there, Alabanza is a beautiful place filled with flowers and wonderful people we were so excited to just be there.  We stayed in cute little cabin/rooms, they were pretty small but that just made bonding all the better. We had our sessions in a big barn and they had even built a little coffee shop for all of us.  We stayed there a week and we would have a lesson or teaching in the morning and then after lunch we would go to ministry.

The Jeffrey's Bay team all went to Rafillwee, a small community where they try to keep people out of trouble by providing jobs and housing.  We were there for the whole week building bricks and shoveling dirt and doing whatever it was they needed.  It was frustrating at first going all the way to Africa just to shovel dirt, but then you realize that you can minister to all the people working there.  Over all the week was awesome and I learned so much.