May Update

Welcome to May- almost winter here, whilst you UK-ers start to enjoy the sunshine (I received an e-mail from Starbucks today saying summer is almost here, and it made me sad.) Last night we experienced our first proper African storm- very loud and dramatic, but luckily our house stayed dry.
The last few weeks have been very busy here, and all of our team have been getting involved in far too many projects to name, but we all love it. I now spend a good amount of my week working with the Community Health Team in the 4 clinics that they run throughout the week- 2 in a settlement called Itsoseng, and 2 here at Cosmo City. It’s an amazing, hectic place to be and we now see more antenatal patents here at Cosmo than the official government clinic over in Zanspruit. Last week I assisted with the Doctor and midwives through the week and saw my fair share of both inspiring and heartbreaking stories. One woman we saw and prayed for was healed of chronic back/leg pain and we saw her leg stretch out so they were equal (amazing-praise God)! But on Tuesday we went on a home visit to see an older lady who had sores in her mouth and on her body and she was offered a HIV test which she took. The test confirmed that she was HIV positive and we sat with her as she tried to take in this news- very sad, but she can now start treatment and receive support which is good news. During the clinics I usually help out with notes and statistics, pharmacy and general helping a hand- it’s all a good learning curve for me. Hopefully this week we will be able to start up a milk bank, providing HIV + women (about 1 in 4 of the women at the antenatal clinic are HIV positive) with formulae milk so to reduce the risk of mother to child transmission.
In the pre-schools, we’ve been doing lots of singing, dancing and today we took them shakers which they loved whilst at ‘Wonderful Me’, a program run in primary schools about self esteem, we dress up as various insects and act out stories- it makes for amusing photographs!

At home we’ve been busy too- on Beth’s birthday we had posh breakfast, went out for a lovely meal and then had a cake party with a few drinks back at the house- I don’t think I have ever eaten so much in one day before! We also had an election sleepover and then on Saturday we waitressed at an event one of the Oasis staff had at her house. All in all, a pretty busy time, but we managed to sleep it all off on Saturday morning.  We have finally got rid of the mice we hope, but they’ve been replaced by ants so still struggling with the animals.
We’re still continuing to go to Godfirst church in the evenings, a newfrontiers church run by PJ Smythe and we’ve almost finished our tour of local churches so we’re hoping to go more regularly to a church called Liberty Church- a mostly African church but the sermon at least is in English which is always helpful. We’ve been made to feel so welcome there and we all enjoy the dancing style worship.
In terms of prayer requests, I think the poverty here is really starting to hit home, so please pray that my and the team’s hearts stay soft and that we can really feel like we’re making a positive difference to people. And secondly for energy- all our activities need a fair bit of energy so please pray I can keep going and not flag or get tired. Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers.
Love, Laura