Participant Blogs

Guatemala…   We entered Guatemala with a bang and so the adventure began… We met up with Pastor Ben that day and so our expectations were blown away. The man Geoff described to us wasn’t the man we met. Grace changed the life of a man completely. The weekend we had of to ourselves to explore a little bit of panajachel and to see how the culture is. Monday the work began… That day not only did we start to work on his new house he is building but also on our new drift trikes… A truly new experience I...

To conclude our 8 month journey through South America we made a complete circle and returned to tropical green jungles with mango trees, red sand and rain storms. Here in Aragua they greet you with a fist pump, speak the Guarani language and give a profound "Amen y amen" at the end of prayers and church services. It is awesome to see what a huge percentage of church service time goes into prayer/conversation with God. After all, Jesus declared in Matt 21:13, "My house will be called a house of prayer." We were under the loving care of Belen and...

The fun and games started when the five Global Challenge X teams were sent up from Pretoria to Zambia in a challenge.  It was a tough one to start with and I must admit that I was a little concerned about this but luckily I had great co-workers to make sure I don’t feel too sorry for the team and do send them off.

Lime Team entry of today's activity. Today the Lime Team started it's first day of work in the city of Chaingmai, Thailand. We were asked to paint the bathrooms of a primary school, and being here to serve the people, we accepted the task. The bathrooms need to be scraped, sanded down and the painted in order for us to complete the task. Today we were able to complete half of the task, the school staff is also kind to us, they brought us coke and fruit to snack on, and they even bought us lunch, God truly is blessing...

    Mauritania truly turned out to be a land of contradiction. Friendly officials at the border, 5 star welcome at the youth hostel and even breakfast in a Taxi! We over landed from Western Sahara, through Mauritania, to Senegal. We spent two nights in Mauritania. The short time in Mauritania was yet another glimpse of God's faithfulness to us. He sent people ahead of us and really provided for us. We experienced incredible favour and protection in this country. We were greatly blessed with friendly and effecient (as far as effeciency gets in Africa) officials at the border....a very...

That night Detlef had a dream that someone needed help driving a blue Land Rover all the way to the Mali border and that we agreed to help- which solved our transport issue!   We weren't sure if we needed to take it serious or not, but in any case would have to start moving. So we decided to take a local bus to the first big town on the road to Mali, which was Kaolack, 200km's from where there.   Our Senegalese bus was soon packed to the rafters and became quite unbearable. To make things worse it broke...

When you are rejected or life gets hard, what is your first reaction? I’ve realized mine tends to be “why me” or “when will it get better.” Recently, I have been challenged to trade my questioning for more faith- to stop and ask God for MORE BOLDNESS. Whether someone has hurt me repeatedly or what I have to say is pushed aside and rejected, I am provoked to press in and ask God to empower me with His Holy Spirit and to actually ask for MORE OF HIM. I don’t want to live a life of passivity, but one of...

     Since we have been in Thailand, we have met up with some additional guests to the Southbound family!

Repentance is like breaking out kitchen cupboards.  It's fun if you're the one doing the breaking, but it hurts to be the cupboard.  Everything inside of you gets exposed - you have nowhere to hide anything, anymore.  Every single thing that has ever been placed inside you, needs to be removed.  You, the old cupboard, has to be thrown away; it can't be fixed, it has to be replaced with a new one.  The way you are now, is completely useless.  You need the Carpenter to give you a new body.  And He's already done it in you.  Religion says:...

The time has finally arrived!! Let the challenge begin!