Editor’s note: Mocha Club member and volunteer, Annie, is blogging from Capetown, South Africa on the Mocha Club trip from May 28th-June 10th. This is our first official “trip blogger” so please help us spread the word and check back for updates!
Our first full day in Cape Town is finished. Phew…And these friends of yours are exhausted. We landed this morning around 9am and Pastor Young Ohm [African Leadership's National Director in South Africa] and some of the other staff picked us up from the airport. It took all the strength we could muster to keep our eyelids open through out the day. Even now, at 7:30pm, we are all sitting around the table, eating dessert, and staring blankly at each other. It’s a touching moment, really.
Let me tell you about our dinner- 10 Americans, a Korean family [Pastor Ohm's], a Canadian missionary, and a German volunteer, having Vietnamese noodle soup in South Africa. And apple crisp for dessert. Obviously.
Pastor Ohm spent the day showing us all around Khayelitsha, the township where we will be doing most of our work. We stopped and looked at a couple of different preschools- in total, African Leadership has built 20 different preschools in Khayelitsha. Which may sound like a lot, but there are over 1 million people in this area of only 2 miles by 4 miles. GOOD GRACIOUS that’s a lot folks.
Here’s the “before” pics. It’s like our own little version of Extreme Home Makeover. Let’s call it Extreme Preschool Makeover: Khayelitsha Edition. (Betsy said, “That doesn’t sound like a good title at all.” I just fired her as my editor.)
Hopefully by next Friday, we’ll have the “after” shots. Pastor Ohm thinks the ten of us (need I remind you only 3 dudes) can lay all the tile, build the inside walls, paint the inside and the outside, and install the door and windows by Friday.
I’m not saying I don’t appreciate his confidence in us. I’m just sayin’…
This picture also amazes me. This is the plot of land where the Mocha Club preschool will be built. So this area, that has thousands of people but no place for the preschool aged children, will finally get a school.
We spent a lot of time at the Pastor Training School as well. We got to attend a talent show for the net-ball team (all girls in their young teens) and we may have contributed to the talent show. Some singing, some dancing; we made you proud. Maybe.
We also went to a Bible Club for high schoolers where they posed some questions to our team – how to deal with peer pressure, faith, and how to handle certain events that happen in high school, etc. It was on-the-spot, we were flexible (as Marisa encourages), and our team did a fantastic job.
About 12 hours in the country, and we have all already been amazed. It’s already a moving experience – seeing the conditions that these people live in, the deep need, and the amazing ways that Mocha Club and African Leadership are meeting these needs. I can’t wait to see what happens after 10 days of working with these projects and experiencing Cape Town.
Observation: It is COLD here. The fact that it’s winter in the southern hemisphere should have encouraged us to pack better, but alas, it did not. So when you start seeing pictures of us and you think, “This was a pic from yesterday”, it’s probably not. We’re going to be wearing ALL of our clothes every day. Oh well.
Love us anyways, okay?
-Annie
