Scream Your Heart Out

Standing in the back of classrooms observing cultural differences. Hearing kids greet in unison anybody who enters the class while in session. Here teacher, administration, and helpers get much more respect than many in the states. Seeing the little kids leave school at the end of each day wearing their Barbie and Spiderman backpacks. Outside lizards hurry freely about, consuming bugs off the ground while birds are perched on rooftops that rats settle in. If you watch a nat or a fly or a bee for a minute it look simply lost. If you ride down the road watching out the window into the hitch hiker's eyes only for a few seconds they look lost, broken, and hurt. Eventually you get to a point where all you would like to do is write a letter to everybody you drive past declaring that they are children of God who He created in His own image. Whom He loves dearly. Whom He cares about. Whom He'd only like the best for. Whom He has a plan for. Who hurts Him when he hurt others. Who is beautiful. So child, scream your heart out.

New trip?! YES PLEASE!

Dear Family & Friends,

I have found myself blessed again, having another opportunity to visit the place that stole my heart last summer: Africa! This summer we're moving a little north, headed to Harare, Zimbabwe. I am going with my friend, Brenna, and her mom, Bonney Deuschle.

  

We are going to visit Brenna's uncle, Tom Deuschle, and his family – who live and work in Zimbabwe - to help out at their church & ministry, Celebration Ministries. We will also get to work with kids in orphanages, which was one of my favorite parts of the South Africa trip last July. We may also get to provide medical relief in a nearby hospital. Working with children, in general, is my passion so I am beyond excited to go love on these kids in need! As it is sounding right now through our email contact with Mr. Deuschle's assistant, they are making many plans to keep us three very busy & productive from the moment we land to the hour we take off at the end of the month.

This will be a wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity for Brenna & me to see numerous new corners of the world and we are both pumped to leave Colorado tomorrow, on June 1st! We will be gone until July 6, 2011. I hope you will conider helping sponsor me via prayer. Please pray that God will prepare the hearts of everyone we get to minister to on our trip. Please pray for God to break our own hearts & provide us with strong stamina and a sense of urgency so we do not hold back from serving Him, or His people. In addition, we ask for you to keep our safety & health in your prayers. Praise be to God how many donations we've been given of lightly used toys and art supplies for the kids in the orphanage(s) we'll visit!

Thank you for your prayers over this trip. Brenna and I believe without a doubt that God is going to change us while we are serving for His glory in Zimbabwe! 

Many thanks,

Elizabeth Wolz

Garden Update

I've mentioned that while we were working in Freedom Park we started a community garden. The people who run the OVC (Orphaned and Volunerable Children) program also have a facebook page and about a month ago they posted an update about the progress of the garden! It looks SO good! The community has clearly worked a lot on the land since we left -- Check out the facebook album :)

Side Effects of a Mission Trip

     There is no way I hadn't written anything about SA since the top of September, so something else pre-dated may show up in a post soon if I find it, but for now I THINK we're all caught up!

Please rewind for a minute though...
Within two weeks of being back home, I had learned of three unfortunate incubations my body was dealing with since leaving Africa.

1. Massive time change: going out there and switching my biological clock ahead 8 hours magically worked out just fine, coming home was the real trouble. With the way dates landed, I had to be at work (CYT summer camp) at 8:30a the day after getting home and for the next four days following! I'll even admit to you that I showered the night we came home but then it didn't even cross my mind again until Wednesday morning. Getting back into the swing of things can take a toll on you: especially when ambien doesn't work to help you sleep...
2. Some sort of unidentified stomach bug. By the time I finally gave up on trying to deal with being sick every 3 - 4 days I went to the doctor who gave me an at-home test (but luckily I never had to take it because it conviently worked itself out after the visit).
3. I broke out with a mild-moderate case of ringworm around August 15, 2010 that I'd apparently picked up from one of the kiddos at Freedom Park somewhere during our time there. Lucky for you, my readers, I did not take a picture of said disturbingly itchy inflammation. Now, 5 months and 5ish days later, I am still washing all my clothes with color safe bleach and applying a perscription cream + a band-aid to the dark circle (after washing the specific sopt with Dial) on my inner right elbow daily...  

Even though I am still dealing with the ringworm, I realize that I am incredibly blessed that it did not surface until our team had been home for a week. I don't know if I can even imagine how horrible it would've been to have to fly home (33 hour trip home) with a ring of fire - so to speak - surfaced on my arm the entire way with no soothing cream. What makes me even more grateful about this whole "ringworm attack" is that once I broke out, I was able to go to the doctor then to Wal*Mart to start a healing remedy for it. The child/ren I picked it up from do not have that so they'd most likely been falling asleep tearing up the skin surrounding their infection for a few nights prior, or at least all day at school or in the Creche.

Dear South African Sweethearts: Thank you for the "forget-me-nots"! Even without my infection, there is no way that I could forget this trip. Ever. Too life changing... :)

After being home for 1 month.

September 7th: Amidst writers block on one of those nights you realize you won't be able to sleep until you write down what is on your mind keeping you awake. I'm not sure how much it just sounds like me complaining about my life, which is definitaly the last thing I mean to do. Also, I realize the rhyme scheme is kind of funky, but this one isn't meant to be perfect...



This year I've told so many people
that it is bad to keep everything in
but tonight while trying to word whats on my heart
I feel like it is being clenched shut, with a clothes pin.

There are lots of things on my heart
that I'd like to relay to our nation
but I don't know how to
rid myself of this suffocation.

Situation being what it is is fine,
nobody cares to listen -
nobody even cares to hear.
I figure that is the root where i feel this division.

Each line of a story
will strike everyone differently.
Love, fear, confusion, or anger -
every story brought something new to me.

I wish I could tell you
everything on my mind that
is making my thought process askew.
If anyone had to live my life for a day, their world would fall flat.

Sharp, Sharp!

This is the note I posted on Facebook on August 27th. I'm posting it seperately/out of chronological order because it is so much longer than the things in the blog post before this one, so please just pretend that it was all done in order, thanks.

Sharp Sharp

In South Africa when you meet someone you show thumbs up, pound it, then press and twist your thumb off of theirs and say "sharp, sharp" (but with their accents it sounds like "shop, shop"). "Sharp" is almost the same as here, for example: after shooting somebody's picture on a digital camera you see it and can say "sharp!" meaning it came out well/"thank you for your time :)"; "Thank you" sounds like a fine mix between the "a" and the "o" in "danky/donky".


Apparently this is what I do: stay up until 3a looking through pictures of a trip that my team just got home from only 19 bizarre days post de-plaining a 36 hour trip back to DIA. This note is me, raw and straight up, being shared at 5 in the morning.

     Rustengurg, South Africa was only my "home" for two weeks out of fifty-two in 2010. I haven't even been back in the States for three full weeks yet and I dont think I could be more "home" sick. The bruises on my shins from playing with (and being full on attacked by*) children may have almost faded by now, but I still have some kind of stomach bug and, as of  Monday, a relatively minor case of ringworm. Anyobody's first thought would be to wish themselves better, but mine is more along the lines of how blessed I am to only be hit with these things now after being back in Denver and not having to deal with it where there are worse cases than my own, that are in desperate  need of treatment that infected individuals cannot pay for.

*Lesson learned from experience: do NOT ever allow yourself to be sitting on the ground playing with 2 - 3 children at the same time 20 more children are dropped off in vans from school. They WILL all over power you - jumping and diving onto your torso or legs, pulling your hair, shirt, and arms, as well as pulling each other's clothes to try to make room for themselves - and you have to call a team mate of yours over for help to stand up but are still out-weighed. With so many young ones seeking love and attention from you, however, the normally simple movement of standing up is complicated by [what feels like] 70% and you are afraid for your life for a minute when you find yourself in a state of: A. needing your own air B. shock at how much children in other countries crave your focus.

     I have cleaned through my clothes, closet, boxes, desk, bags and junk almost twice since coming home. I still have too much stuff! I realize that I am an average 20 year old American girl living at home and it is "normal" here to have a good deal of things, but really?

     While we were in South Africa, some of the guys on our team built 3 shacks for selected people of the AIDS squatter camp (comminuty) we worked called Freedom Park. The first shack our team built was for a man, his wife, their 2(?) daughters, and little boy who is shy beyond words. I believe the care takers told us that the whole family is HIV positive. The second shack was for a girl who is my age and was just left with her much younger sister and brother (probabally 5 or 6 years old and 3 maybe 4 years old). Their mother recently died, leaving them with each other and the baby boy without pants. Our third shack more team members had a chance to help build because it was in the fence in area next to the garden our 'garden team' dug up for the community to develop. We built this one for a single man who steped up as a voulenteer to keep watch on the garden as it flourishes so nobody breaks in and steals everything at night. We left a bag of food and jug of tap water at each shack when we handed over the keys and prayed as a big group over the families. Every time I think about that day in the middle of the second week of our trip, I am amazed with how people know how to make so much of so little. I wish it were easier to live like that here and stand out in our communities like that.

We all have hypothetically enough energy, time, and food in our kitchens to stay home from school or work for a continual 24 hour period and do nothing but consume it. The children that I got sick from are fed typically once a day + given candy by "the white people" who are complete strangers who gave up a small amount of time to give the kids hugs, a bottle of bubles, a bag of legos, and/or crayons with a blank sheet of paper. Children who do not even know what a T.V. is can draw, color, play, dance, or find any other way to express themselves better than any modern day American 5 year olds that I know.

    I have told a few of you that the team that went on this trip last year wrote a beautiful song - called "Lerato" ("Love") about "Peter Pan" & the "Lost Boys." What I have not told all of you is that my favorite lines from the song are the last two of the chorus:

Chorus
So come sail away with me off to the red soil
Step out of your boat and see what I can do
You might think that I’ve called you off to change the world
Maybe it’s the world that’s changing you
(all of the lyrics to the song can be found at http://smithsa.blogspot.com/search/label/Missions%20Teams towards the bottom of the page)

     I realize the fact that I cannot do a whole lot to change the world. While in South Africa, through the surreal "culture shell shock" I did realize that I can put ALL of my energy into making a few children a little bit more happy daily regardless of how beat I will be at the end of each day of my "work". Swinging a child around in a circle by their arms for a minute while they are smiling, screaming, and laughing may be one less minute they are thinking about the scene of their shack being broken into and watching their mother/big sister/baby being rapped the night before... Hearing their stories definetaly puts you in your place.

 I'm not sure if you can actually see how "home" sick I am. </3

 I have a LOT of pictures form this trip up on my photography Facebook account in the albums "Lerato Wena" (1-3) (only visible to friends, so add it!)!! I know better than to expect anyone who made it through this whole note to go look at each picture because you most likely just used up any free time left in your day reading this monsterous note containing SOME of my 5am "home"sick emotions that kept me up tonight. A lot of you have asked me to tell you my stories and even though it may not be the same as me going through the albums with you (due to lack of time and coordination) I have a lot of stories set as captions with those pictures. Take a look, and you may possibly catch a glimps as to why I cried while writing this note. Sharp, sharp!

Word Association

Wednesday, August 11, 2010  (we got home the night of the 8th).

36 +1/2 hours of travel later, we're home. Sunday night I got home around 8:30 - 9, showered, tried to eat dinner (fresh salad, bratwurst, grilled zucchini), checked facebook, then was "sleeping like a dead person" by 10:40 and didn't wake up once till 6a Monday morning for work [work = CYT summer camp Area Coordinator(talk to parents and keep everything running smooth and give kids band aids, etc]. Yep, the plan was to bounce right back. Hahah. Went to work at 8, talked with Jenni Hoag about the impact of "missionary trip shell shock" regarding the level of poverty in Freedom Park (much less any 3rd world country)(I mentioned the story of the moms pawning off their 3 year olds), I don't think she'd heard that one before, but I don't remember her exact reaction. We also talked about how eager I am to go back, or go somewhere new, to serve. She thinks it's crazy-awesome how much God seems to have worked in me out in South Africa (because it is) and made sure to note that it is so important to take time to process everything we worked on, saw, and did because then it will benefit me, and possibly/hopefully other people for the rest of my life.

[Here in my journal for some reason I decided to document the rest of the day after camp got out and most all of Tuesday, but it doesn't seem to hold much value so you readers won't have to be concerned with it haha.]

**I'm finding it hard to even know how to process everything right now...!


8/29: 2 of the past 3 nights I have only slept under/with my SA airlines blanket... Coincidence? Maybe. Sub-conscience something? Possibly. [SA airlines blanket = the background for the picture below.]

8/30:

Welcome to the only page of my sketch pad you'll most likely ever see.

Word Association: South Africa
(more like "thought process")

1. Yes.
2. Move in June?
3. Start (mission work) with YWAM? ---> focus on: child ministry, child development, child psychology --> forever?
4. I feel like I should moce to Rustenburg. This idea makes me feel like crying, except it is good. I don't know why I have this urge... but I don't feel like if it is going to happen in June, then June can't + won't come fast enough
5. I would like to do this :) God is too good to put this on my heart and not provide the means for it to happen. My heart is with South Africa. My heart is for South Africa. My Heart is in South Africa.
6. South Africa: sounds lonely...
7. South Africa: keeps me awake at night
8. South Africa: seems all I think about most of the time, even being home 22 days + processing all I have from the trip so far...
9. South Africa: (Congo)(Africa)sounds scary -- 200 women + 4 babies raped?! 
10. Anything that happens is for God's glory
11. South Africa: sounds perfect!