I'm Back!

So, about a week ago I returned from the best experience of my life- visiting a small country in Africa called Swaziland. I traveled there on a missions trip with other members of my church, Celebration Church. The country of Swaziland is very different from America, as you can imagine. What, of course, was most evident was how blessed we are in states to have such modern conviences. Many people in Swaziland still live in mud huts with no electricity and still travel long distances to the nearby crocodile infested river to collect water!
In Swaziland we worked with an amazing organization call Children's Cup. (If you ever consider donating to a "worthy" cause, I can testify that it should be them. They are doing amazing things in Swaziland. They are the "real" deal!) Children's cup has 14 carepoints in Swaziland, 2 in Mozambique, and 2 in Zimbabwe. These carepoints are safe places the children in the nearby community can come to play, get educated, seek minor medical care, and most importantly, get fed a good meal!
On the trip, I was blessed to lead my team in training teachers from the carepoints we visited. We taught them how to use the centers model of teaching and had "make and take" projects for them to work on. What was also fun was that I brought a number of "prizes" for them. They all enjoyed winning something and it was all fun, colorful, yet educationally valuable tools for teaching! Another big project we worked on was painting the play equipment and building at a carepoint. The rest of our time, every moment we could, we just played with the children and loved on them! We loved introducing them to scratch and sniff stickers, which we passed out everywhere we went! Check out these pictures: