Uitenhage

Merry Christmas Everyone

It doesn't feel much like Christmas here so you'll all have to enjoy the snow a little bit more this year for us. For the past two weeks we have been on outreach, which is the second half of the Discipleship Training School. Outreach is pretty much just a three month long missions trip that will take us westward in South Africa and then to the Philippines in mid January.
We started in Uitenhage, a city of about 80,000 people just 40 minutes from J'Bay. Our school leader, Daan Abrahams, grew up in Uitenhage. For the past two weeks we have been participating in a number of different ministries with local churches and families. We spent the two weeks in an old cinema that turned into a night club that turned into a church in the center of the city. Kati and I spent our nights down the road from the church in a house with all of the girls, but we had our own room.
A large portion of our time in Uitenhage was spent planning, organizing, and running open air meetings. We would spend time before the meeting started walking throughout the community and telling people about the meeting later than night. The meeting itself would consist of worship songs, testimonies, a gospel presentation and the dramas that we have worked on as a team. We use the dramas to enhance certain topics or messages because there is quite a language barrier here. A lot of people speak English, but when you get into the communities that number goes way down, less than half. The area where we held these open air meetings is called Moeg Gesurkel, which means "tired of suffering" in Afrikaans. Moeg Gesurkel is a hill covered with shanty shacks, it is the largest township in Uitenhage.
We also spend some time in the afternoons helping out with a "soup kitchen" in Moeg Gesurkel. It wasn't a soup kitchen as much as just a few families who used the little money they had to feed homeless or suffering children. The last afternoon that we helped they served soup and bread to over 80 children as old as 12 or 13 and as young as 2 years. It was heartbreaking to see as some of their mothers stood there drunk at 3 in the afternoon and waited to get food after the children were fed.
During one of our open air meetings, Kati met and man named Garrett. He was struggling with alcoholism and asked Kati to pray for him. A lot of people we meet here have responded to gospel presentations before and are quick to respond to anything religious and ask for prayer or try and go through some sort of alter call experience again and again. Kati resonded to Garrett by telling him that she would pray for him, but that he needs to know God for himself, learn to pray for himself, and actually give his life to God rather than just talk about it religiously. Garrett decided to commit his life to Christ, laying down alcoholism in order to follow God. The conversation went onwards from there and Kati eventually prayed for Garrett before he left, specifically praying that he would get a job so that he could lead his family away from the life they had fallen into. We went back to see him a few days later and after being out of work for a year he had found a job. He had been sober since he spoke and prayed with Kati and his wife had even been sober for 3 days. Their shack was no longer covered in beer bottles and urine, the children were clean and and fed. Kati later spoke at an open air and used this story and his testimony to encourage others to break the chain of alcoholism.
Another part of our ministry is street evangelism. The culture here is much different than at home - most people claim to have a religion - whether Christianity or Islam, they typically say they belong to something. On one of our days out, Brian met a man named Muhammed who came here from Senegal to find work. He was working as a street vendor selling knock-off sunglasses and purses. When he found out Brian was a missionary, a long conversation ensued about the differences between Islam and Christianity, who Jesus really is and the Lewis Trilemma. Brian went back day after day to talk with Muhammed (keep in mind that many Muslims are equally as evangelical as Christians) and the two became friends - he actually stopped by the church one night during worship to give Brian a copy of the Koran. One of Brian's gifts in evangelism is in intellectual conversations about the existence of God and around Christ's claim of being God. He was finally able to engage with someone here who doesn't just claim to have religion, but knows what he believes and why.
Now we are in Mossel Bay - we have very limited access to Internet so we might not be on again until we reach the Philippines. We're in good hands here - staying in the community with our school leader's mother-in-law, who loves to cook and care for us.

Go to Picasa and check out our new photos - we only have a few since we have so little Internet access.

We're off

We’ve noticed that more people seem to be following us than we thought, and apologize that over the past few months, we haven’t really posted that much information to follow! The bulk of our time so far has been spent in class, with a little ministry and a little taste of South Africa in between. At some point we’ll post some information about the teaching – we heard from some amazing people from all different walks of life with some really interesting perspectives.


The lecture phase of the DTS came to a close on Wednesday and we leave for outreach this morning. We have a team of nine people from South Africa, Switzerland, Canada and the States. We will start out in Uitenhage, spending two weeks living with local families and doing primarily youth, open-air and prison ministry. Then we will move on to Mossel Bay, another coastal town like J’Bay. We will spend two to three weeks there doing similar work and staying with a local family. Then we’ll drive to Johannesburg and leave for the Philippines in early January, coming back at the end of February. The map below shows our route through South Africa. Pray for Brian - he's driving the Kombi.


While in the Philippines, we’ll be staying on a newly pioneered YWAM base in Batangas, a  city 2 ½ hours from Manila. We’ll also stay in local churches for one week at a time when working away from the base. We’ll be doing similar outreach work including mercy ministries - although we won’t be working in the same area where the recent hurricanes hit, we will likely spend time working with the poor, and perhaps underprivileged children/orphans. 


We hope to post updates more regularly about the work we’re doing on outreach and what’s happening – thanks so much for continuing to pray for our safety and provision!

Belated Schedule

Lately we've been asked quite frequntly about our day to day business down here and we realized that we never shared about the daily base activity. SO here it is.

We are up at 6:00 and walking down to the base for breakfast from 6:30 to 7:00
From 7:00 to 8:00 is a time used for individual study/devotions
At 8:00 we meet as an entire base for either worship or intercession
Lectures for the DTS start around 9:30 and run through until 1:00
Lunch is from 1:00 to 2:00
From 2:00 to 4:00 is either work duties around the base or ministry. The ministries we participate in range from childrens ministry to fixing/cleaning peoples homes (really shacks) in the community.
Supper is at 5:30
Two or three times a week we will meet at 7:00 for ministry or planning meetings depending on the things we have coming up
Weekends are usually free. We use this time to go down to the beach, read for class, check out different places in and around town, church on Sunday mornings (we've been to a bunch of different churches), laundry, cleaning our room etc

We love you all and ask for your prayers as we prepare to leave for outreach next week, we'll keep you udpated on all of our outreach stuff as we go.

Shoes

I wasn’t going to share this story on the blog, but due to a few requests I feel like maybe someone out there needs to hear this story. Two weeks ago we bought a pair of shoes for a guy here.. Three weeks ago I felt like God wanted me to buy one of the staff members  a pair of shoes. He is a Xhosa (tribe native to South Africa) man who has been a missionary with YWAM for years. I talked to Kati about this idea and she agreed. I was determined to go that same day to buy him shoes. But he wasn’t around, and each day after I talked myself out of it more and more. I have always enjoyed giving to others and feel like God gave me the comfortable life that I have had, in part, so that I can be a blessing to others with material needs. I would count my needs and give everything else away, but this time was different because we don’t have all of our money for outreach yet. There is a story in the gospels where a widow gives out of her poverty and not just out of wealth, this is the first time I have ever given out of my poverty, and it was much more challenging than I thought. After a week of procrastinating, I finally brought this man to the mall. After telling him not to pay attention to the price, he picked out a pair of shoes that was ZAR 799, which came out of our bank statement as USD 108. I was stressed at first at the price. But as I listened to myself tell him that these shoes were from God and not me, I realized that I doubted the truth of the very words I was speaking. The man was so excited in the store. He prayed and thanked God in the middle of the store lifting his hands in the air and shouting. He told me he had never in his life had a new pair of shoes and that he had prayed for something like this in the past. He was so excited he insisted on wearing the shoes out of the store. I felt like I had been obedient but I still doubted my words to him about the gift being from God. After dinner that night I was confident that I had been a blessing, but not sure that I had made a wise decision. I went on the computer to check my email and there was a message from home. Someone had just sent a USD 100 check to my parents for our missions work here in Africa. I have never experienced direct provision like this before; it was literally the same day and almost the exact same amount. I have never given out of my poverty before, but I look forward to doing so again the next time God calls. So what is this story really about? Two weeks ago Jesus bought a pair of shoes for a guy here.

The Farm

Brian recently took the “YWAM driving test” and is now authorized to drive the base Kombi. Since any person who takes the Kombi is responsible for paying for gas, we don’t actually use it to go anywhere, except to make the daily milk runs. Brian took over the job for William, one of the base staff who fetches the milk every day.

All of the milk on the base is provided free by a small farm on the outskirts of Jeffrey’s Bay. The only requirement is that it’s picked up daily after 4pm. Each day, we drive out to the farm with one gallon pails and old water jugs to fill with fresh milk. The farm has around 75-100 cows and what looks like hundreds of acres of farmland. Check out the video on the video bar to the left, anyone in the Benson family won’t notice much of a difference. Everything looks (and smells) the same – this farm even has a compost business.

We also met an American veterinarian who has been living in Israel for the past 20 years and was visiting the farm to purchase heifers for a development project in Algeria. The Kay-Ben Farm participated in a similar project when the state brought dairy cattle and other agricultural goods to Cuba back in 2006.

Details

Things are still going well for us here in J'Bay. The weather is beginning to turn and it seems to be taking my allergies away with it, hallelujah. Kati and I wanted to share some outreach information with you. All of this stuff could change depending on the financial situation of all the students, we are supposed to buy our plane tickets next week and a lot of the students do not have the money for the plane tickets, not to mention the rest of the outreach fees. The outreach fees are quite a bit more than Kati and I had expected. Right now they are ZAR 22,000 each, ZAR 44,000 total. This is USD 6,000 for a three month long missions trip for the two of us. This is much more than we expected but we are not worried, we have the money to buy the plane tickets next week. We are tentatively spending 2 weeks as an entire school in a town about 2 hours away before we split up into teams. The other team will travel north into South Africa and our team will go west for 3 weeks. Then the other team will fly to Brazil and our team will fly to Philippines for 6 weeks. Our team is 10 students and 3 staff, the other team is 13 students and 4 staff.

We also wanted to give out the our details correctly, because we have sent out the wrong mailing address to some of you. We sorry for that, please email us if you have mailed us things to make sure that we have received them. Our contact information is now listed in a box to the left. I don't know about the customs in South Africa, so far we have had no problems with anyone's packages, including food. Please do not send money to us here, we have been told that the postal service has had trouble with corruption. If you would like to support us financially or give us money for any reason, please send it to one of our mothers (the addresses are also listed to the left). ALSO we have a cell phone and it costs us nothing to receive calls. If you can get your hands on a phone card or skype or any type of an international calling plan, feel free to call us whenever, we love you and miss you all. We uploaded more pictures too so check them out.
Enjoy the snow for the both of us.

Nations2Nations

Hey everyone,
This past week we hosted a national YWAM Nations2Nations conference here in Jeffrey’s Bay. There were nearly two hundred people from all over the world that came to participate. The basic idea of Nations2Nations, which is under the YWAM umbrella of ministries, is to empower missionaries. The majority of the teaching that happens at Nations2Nations is about God’s heart for the nations. When the concept of missions work started it was from Israel to the nations (pretty much the book of Acts and on through the epistles), then for centuries it was “from the west to the rest”. But today half of the world’s active missionaries are non-westerners, missions work is now “from the nations to the nations”. This week was also a celebration of YWAM J’Bay’s tenth anniversary. It was a good conference with a mixture of teaching, worship, and celebration. But for Kati and I it was a long week apart. We volunteered to leave our room so that a family with two kids from Uganda could use it. Kati slept with the rest of the girls from our DTS. I slept on the floor of the Vineyard church down the road. The church is less than a ten-minute walk from the base and I stayed there with 26 other single dudes, the guys of two DTS schools from other YWAM bases in South Africa and Swaziland. The week ended with a worship and prayer meeting where everyone was in an auditorium standing on a map of the world that covered the floor of a room bigger than a basketball court. It was a really cool way to wrap up the week and pray for the nations where missionaries are really struggling (I spent some time standing on Maine too). We have uploaded pictures from this past week so make sure you check those out. We will be updating again soon with more details about our DTS and outreach, also with the correct mailing address and other logistical pieces of information. (www.4kworldmap.com, www.nations2nations.org)
We love you and miss you all.

Outreach Info

Hey everyone,
Just wanted to post really quick about our outreach details. For those of you who don't know, we have 3 months of lectures and ministry here locally in J'Bay and then 3 months of outreach somewhere else. SO starting December 7th, my bday, we will be on outreach. We will spend the first 6 weeks in other areas of South Africa and the second 6 weeks abroad. The team that Kati and I are on is going to the Philippines. We're excited about it and feel like this is where God is leading us. The other group is spending the second 6 weeks in Brazil. If any of you have been to the Philippines or knows anything about this nation let us know, we really don't know much about it yet. We will let know know the specifics about where in the Philippines we will be and what we are doing as we find out.
peace and love

It begins..

We spent last weekend at the Shell Festival, ate our first Kudu burgers and learned a bit more about the culture. Jeffrey's Bay is a tourist area, known by most surfers for the Super Tubes (which we have yet to see). The primary languages here are Afrikaans and Xosa – we are both picking up as much Afrikaans as we can, but we haven’t made much progress. Almost everybody speaks English.

The town is segregated by color, despite the fact that color isn't a factor on where you live in Post-Apartheid Jeffrey’s Bay. The “colored area” is marked by clusters of small houses; some of which are built with scrap wood and tin roofing, but most of which are concrete. Many of them are owned by the government, but some are privately owned. In other cases, people build by the side of the road illegally and eventually the government just allows to them to live there. The base is closer to this neighborhood, but also a short walk away from the beach and all the downtown shops and restaurants. The white area, which was named during Apartheid when people categorized as black, white and colored lived separately, includes apartments overlooking the beach and privately owned homes (many of which are gated) on the other side of town.

Classes are going really well so far and we have started doing some work in the community, including cleaning up the litter in the streets and helping the locals with yard work. We will be posting more this week about our everyday life and our plans for outreach. Feel free to post any questions and we’ll answer them in our next post.