my name is temba

Saneebonanee! (or hello!)
friends!

I’m in Swaziland, Africa right
now… crazy right? The village we are living in is called Timbutini which
literally translates to “too many goats” and the name couldn’t be
more fitting. They are all over the place. On our homestead there are goats,
cows, hens and about 5 too many roosters. The roosters are horrible. When you
think rooster you think about them crowing when the sun comes up. Not ours.
They are blind or something cause they regularly start crowing between
2:30am-3:30am and keep going till it’s light outside. Maybe they are fortune
telling crows or something. At night we throw rocks at them to try to throw off
their sleeping schedule but it hasn’t worked. Actually the past two mornings
they’ve been crowing like crazy and I went outside to run them off and 3 of
them were outside our window crowing. We have a mutual hate for each other.
They are worse than an alarm clock.

Life here in Swazi is so basic.
We have big metal water tanks that get filled semi regularly and are connected
to our gutter so rain water can flow into them. That is our main source of
water outside of our bottled drinking water. We use the tank water to clean,
wash our clothes (by hand!) , take bucket showers. What is this bucket shower
you ask..? You fill up a bucket with water, go into this sheet metal privacy
deal and cup water over yourself, soap up, then rinse. That my friends is good
living. I love the bucket showers! Just like I would at home, I take long
bucket showers. They are great! We also have 3 out houses (not your typical
port-o-pots) to do business on. I use a specific one that doesn’t have a door
and semi faces the dirt road. You know, it kind of makes things more exciting.
First time I went to sit down I thought I about to fall through down into the
poo. I sit gingerly now.

We have electricity a good
majority of the time but we don’t really need it other than to power our frig
and lights once it gets dark. I’m sure our electric bill would make you
envious. As you can guess we don’t have the Internet. The closest Internet
to us is about a 20 minute drive into a town called Manzini. I guess Internet
would cost about 100 bucks a month and considering that 70% of the population
makes less than a dollar a day…yeah. Not even our local chief has Internet.
Crazy thing is that everyone and seriously everyone has a cell phone! Even
our Gogo Shangway (grandma) who is 70 years old and lives this super basic,
chicken killing life, has a cell phone… I can ‘t make any sense of it. She is
really fun though.

Life here is a great though.
The terms “hurry up and wait” and “swazi time” are so true
of swazi. If something starts at 10am it might start at 11am. Regularly I feel
like we are in a hurry to get somewhere then stand around for a good 15
minutes. You’d think it would stress you out but you get used to it and the
change of pace has been refreshing for me. Life is slow and laid back. There is
no real hurry for anything and honestly with the crap dirt roads you couldn’t
go anywhere fast if you wanted to. (fun story: there are always cows in the
road so one of the local missionaries named Dennis, made up a game called
“punch! that! cow!” in which you try to punch the cow from your car.
Ha! We’ve not been successful yet but before I leave I will have “punched
that cow!”

Lets get to the good stuff.

We’ve started spending time at
the “care points” where many orphans and children spend time. There
are three that we’ll be spending a majority of our time at. The children have
big beautiful smiles and are always filled with joy. Kids that have nothing,
sometimes no family, nothing to call their own and they have joy. Seems like we
have messed up somewhere along the way doesn’t it? We have so much but lack joy
a lot of the time. Their joy comes from love which is from God.

On our first
day at the care center nearest our homestead the magay (a volunteer mother)
gave us swazi names cause “American names are too hard.” Her name
written out phonetically is lun-gee-le and that’s an easy Swazi name. She is a
lot of fun and always laughing at/with us. The swazi name given to me is
“Temba” (sounds like “Simba” with a “T”) meaning
“hope.” So cool… While at the care centers we play with the kids
and just love on them like crazy. We tickle them, play tag and spin them around
till we are all dizzy. You can’t keep their hands out of your own or keep them
out of your arms. It’s so great! There was a little girl named
“Sunda” that was very to herself. She wouldn’t play, somehow wasn’t
ticklish and really pretended like we didn’t even exist. I stayed close to
her though and after what seemed like forever I finally saw emotion on her face
as a tear rolled down her cheek. Of course I don’t know why but I can’t even begin
to imagine what goes through these precious children’s minds. I immediately
picked her up and held her close. I rubbed her little back and wiped the sweat
and snot off her face. My heart absolutely melted and after a few minutes of
rocking her she was sleeping in my arms. I whispered quietly in her ear over
and over that there is hope, that she is loved and that Jesus loved her. That
is why I am here… “temba.” A baby, a tot, a child needs to be held.
They need to know they are loved. They didn’t chose this life. Its not
something they did wrong or their fault in anyway. We have got to love! Jesus
needs us to love! If we don’t do it, then who will? Please, please realize that
wherever you are and whatever your doing you have got to love. The world is
dying for people to love them.

 Alright, I
love you guys soo much. You are such an incredible blessing to me. Please
continue to pray for myself and my team! God has great things in store for
Swazi!

     Ryan (temba)