vanessawalter - Goodbye South Africa

By vanessawalter Oct 15, 2024 3:02 AM 3 min read

Goodbye South Africa

Hi everyone! I want to thank you all for your prayers while I was in South Africa and here is a little recap about my time there! I LOVED my time i...

Name

Also receive impact updates, new trip launches, and exciting high impact crowd-funding projects from Adventures in Missions - Less frequent.

Also receive impact updates, new trip launches, and exciting high impact crowd-funding projects from World Race - Less frequent.

Also receive Radical Living Updates from Seth Barnes, Founder of Adventures in Missions - Monthly or More frequent.

Support vanessawalter

Hi everyone! I want to thank you all for your prayers while I was in South Africa and here is a little recap about my time there!

I LOVED my time in South Africa and it came to an end way too fast! It is crazy how the kids you work with for a month can get a hold of your heart. While working in the orphanage we not only got to play and love on the kids, but we also got to minister to the men and women that work there.

We got to build amazing relationships with them by just listening to their story’s and by giving them a little break from the kids. The men and women that help at the orphanage have been raised there. It is like one giant family and everyone has such deep love for each other. It is so beautiful to see!

In my last blog I asked for the prayer request of being able to build relationships with the high school kids and the women of the orphanage. The Lord provided a time for us to put on a conference called Beauty for Ashes.

In this conference the older kids and the women who have been working at the orphanage nonstop got to go and have fellowship without the little ones. There was a group of us who stayed back at the orphanage and took care of the kids while the women and older kids got to go to the mission house and have a time of fellowship with each other along with a photo shoot and so many fun things. The Lord definitely provided time for us to pour into these older kids and women just like we all have been praying for. We saw so many beautiful things come from this conference and the Lord was definitely at work within these women and older children!

The last week of ministry in SA was a week I wish was never coming. That week we soaked in all the cuddles, cries, giggles, and blowouts from the babies.

We enjoyed our time sitting and being patient with the 5 and 6 year olds either helping them write their letters, letting them play with our hair, and just chasing them around the play ground. It is crazy how much you can fall in love with these little kids that you met only a month ago.

It was so, so hard to leave the precious kids and the wonderful men and women on Friday.

There were many, many tears from our team and from the kids, but we left knowing that our Heavenly Father loves them even more than we do. Prayer requests for this week would be that our hearts would be healed for being so heavy and so sad from leaving SA. Also that we can have open hearts to what the Lord will have in store for us in Eswatini!