Final Report

I've been back in the states five days now and it's been well over a week since I was able to update anything here. Just to briefly recap the last week, we went on a retreat with the students from UKZN that was awesome. About 25 students came with us and we had a great weekend, letting the local students connect with each other and the Crusade staff, learning, worshiping and hanging out together. Just over the course of a few days you could see the local students beginning to take ownership of ministry on their campus as they were encouraged to see all God has done in the past weeks and the realization that next semester there will be no one there to carry it on except for them. After the retreat our US team went out to a backpackers camp for a day of debriefing and then a safari to end the trip. The safari was amazing and the debrief was a great way to bring closure to the eventful six weeks we had together. Now onto some thought about the whole trip...

When we arrived in Durban back in May we had a three-fold mission for our time there. The three objectives were to reach the UKZN campus with the good news of the gospel, reach the community with the good deeds of the gospel, and to encourage and resource the full time Crusade staff there in Durban. Looking back it is wonderful to see that God allowed us to see all three of those things take place. Our first three weeks were spent on campus, everyday Mon.-Fri. from about 10-4, meeting students, initiating gospel conversations and eventually following up with those students and even beginning to disciple them. In those three brief weeks we saw 25(!!) students accept Christ. It was unbelievable to see how open many of the students were to the gospel and the way the Lord had been preparing hearts to hear and receive the good news. We were also able to follow up with most of these students at least twice, and with some as many as 5 or 6 times. 10 of them came with us on the retreat. It was amazing to see how God was beginning to redeem that campus.
The second goal, community outreach, was our focus for the last 2-3 weeks. This was accomplished in a number of ways: helping at an orphanage, painting schools, visiting retirement homes, serving breakfast to displaced refugees and working on houses in one of the townships. We spent the most time in a township called Ntezuma. This township is home to 500,000 people and studies have shown that it is 47% HIV positive. There is incredible need there! We partnered with an American lady who is there trying to start an AIDS hospice and clinic through one of the local churches. She had only been in Durban a few weeks when we met and started helping her. We did a number of things with her, but most of our work was on houses of people in the community who will hopefully soon be patients of the clinic (once it is up and running). We repaired roofs, doors, windows, dug drainage ditches and spent a lot of time just playing with kids. Seeing the poverty of the township was very hard emotionally and psychologically, but the work there was incredible rewarding. Our last day there may have been the saddest good-byes we had before we left.
Lastly, we wanted to encourage the local staff. One of the best moments of the trip was on the day we left, when the local staff just expressed their thanks for us for our work and their excitement at all that had happened that they will continue to be involved in. They were thrilled to see students excited on campus for the first time in over a decade, happy to be connected to the ministry in Ntezuma and thrilled that some of us were considering coming back in future summers or even on short term trips (1-2 years) after graduation.
Some other provisions that God blessed us with were our team and safety while we were there. We had 18 awesome students who were committed to our vision and worked hard to see it come to fruition. In God's grace we all got along great for the whole six weeks and never really had any drama. We were also very blessed to never be victim to any crime. The crime is unbelievably bad there, but not one of us was every victim to it. No one had anything taken, and neither us nor our cars were never harmed.
To end, I just want to thank you for your support. Whether you have read every blog posting since I left or this is the first you've seen, your support truly did make the trip possible and you played a HUGE part in God's work in Durban. Your financial support me allowed me to be there, but you support in prayer strengthened our team daily and allowed us to see God's hand at work in a community that desperately needs his redemption. So again, thank you, thank you, thank you.
God bless.