Katie and Joey's South Africa Blog: Such an AMAZING day at RivLife!

Today was an absolutely amazing day at RivLife!! We started out with the HIV/AIDS support group as we always do on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The boys were supposed to be carving with Bennett, but he did not come today because his wife had to go to the hospital to be with a client so he stayed home and looked after the baby. It started out as a slow day because many of the group members did not show up today. Our teacher (who is an awesome man!) came with us this morning so he was out front talking with Joey and Lucas. Me and Beka were inside with three women and we were just talking and doing crafts! While the girls were inside with the women, two women were passing by outside where the boys were and they stopped and were talking with the boys. Menwhile, me and Beka continued our conversation inside and were telling the women how we meet with D-Groups at school (which is like a Bible study or a group that meets to talk about their weeks and prayer requests, etc) and we told them about something that we do called “high and low.” For those of you who do not know what high and low is, it is a thing where we go around the circle and tell what our high for the week was and what the low was, or what we struggled with. Then at the end, we will pray for the people and the struggles that they are currently facing. We did this with the women and it was very successful. The women enjoyed this and were very open with us about their struggles and I know that for me and Beka, we enjoyed this as well! It was an amazing bonding moment and God was definitely in the whole situation. We continued on to pray for these women and they were all very appreciative! While Beka and I were in the room with the women, the boys had been outside talking to the girls still and something very amazing happened there as well!! The women disclosed to them that they were also HIV positive and they talked with our teachers, the boys, and Nomvula, one of the volunteers and decided that they would start coming to the support group next week!! The boys were continuing to have good conversation, so they stayed and Beka and I went to do some home visits with Nomvula to visit HIV patients who were sick and in bed. The first women we visited had been taken medication for a month, but wasn’t seeing much improvement yet. Her family asked us to pray for her, which was also a very good opportunity. After we returned home from the home visits, one of the girls that had been talking to Joey and Lucas gave me a necklace! :) It was so sweet of her and awesome to receive a gift from her :) We also visited one other women after this, then we all made our way back to the main service site. We went to the crèche and had an amazing time there because we hadn’t gotten to see the kids for very long the day before due to the rain. One bad thing that happened was one of the little girls was dancing, and she fell and split her chin open and it was GUSHING blood and the poor little girl was crying so much and so scared when she saw the blood. Me and Joey both got a little sick to our stomachs when we saw this, but she ended up being okay (even though she probably should have gotten stitches)!! Then we went to the drop-in center and did out usual serving food and playing with the kids. On the way home I took out my corn rows J