Our second week in Swaziland has flown by. This week has been full of praying and asking God what we are supposed to do in Swaziland. On Monday we spent the day on a game reserve. We spent the first part of the day driving around looking for animals and the second part of the day we spent in prayer and quiet time with God. On Tuesday we split up and went to care points to play with kids and help the Gogos feed the kids. The care point that my group went to is the timbutini care point which is also our church and it is just down the road from our homestead. We played games with the kids and taught them a bible story. One little boy that is always at that care point has become one of our favorite kids. His name is Thabani. The first thing you notice about Thabani is the huge smile that is permanantly on his face. The second thing you notice is his constant drooling. Thabani is mute. He can hear but he has never been able to speak. Despite this fact he is the most happy little boy I have ever met. He is a constant joy. He is always the first kid to come running up to us and greet us and the last one trying to walk back with us to our homestead. His mother does not have the money to send Thabani to the special school for deaf and mute children so he has a hard time learning. You will often get hit and drooled on when you are playing with Thabani but no one cares because of his smile. On wednesday we went to the hospital in Manzini. My group went to the children’s ward and the maternity ward. We prayed for a lot of the people that we met and just talked to them for a while. In one of the rooms that we visited we saw two babies who were just sitting there alone and one of the nurses told us that they had been abandoned. One woman that we talked to in the maternity ward had just lost her baby that morning. It was heartbreaking to see her face while she was watching all of the other mothers with their new babies. On friday our team split up into two groups and made house visits. The family that my group visited had just lost their daughter. She was in her 30s and had been sick for a while. We shared verses with the family and prayed with them. We also helped them with some manual labor to get ready for the funeral. We are already building some great relationships with the people here. God is working miracles in Swaziland and I can’t wait to see what else he has in store.
